! LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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i UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



FOLLOWI 



Tat Library 

op Cou«w*9s 



A MANUAL FOR CHURCH-MEMBERS. 



Rev. JOSEPH B. STRATTON, D.D., 

Pastor of the Presbyterian Church, Natchez, Miss. 




PHILADELPHIA \ 
PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION, 

1334 CHESTNUT STREET. 



%1 



COPYRIGHT, 1884, BY 

THE TRUSTEES OF THE 

PRESBYTERIAN BOARD OF PUBLICATION. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 



Westcott & Thomson, 
Stereotype™ and Electrotypers, Philada. 



PREFACE. 



This volume is a companion to one 
entitled Confessing Christ: A Manual for 
Inquirers in Religion, published several 
years ago, and, like that, has been pre- 
pared mainly in reference to the wants of 
the author's own congregation. A pastor 
whose solicitudes for the welfare of his 
flock have run parallel with a lifetime may 
naturally extend those solicitudes beyond 
the period in which his voice is to be 
heard, and may find in them a sufficient 
reason for desiring to leave behind him a 
legacy of affectionate counsel The hope 
that what was designed to be a help to 



4 PREFACE. 

a particular community may also serve as 
a cruide to earnest souls in other commu- 
nities who are seeking to follow Christ, has 
led to the offering of this volume to the 
public. 

Natchez Parsonage, May i, 1884. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGE 

Introductory • • • 7 

CHAPTER II. 

True Conception of Religious Living 14 

CHAPTER III. 
Rule of Religious Living 39 

CHAPTER IV. 
Observance of Public Worship 75 

CHAPTER V. 

Private Prayer . . f 93 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Cultivation of Personal Religion 115 

CHAPTER VII. 

Religion in the Church 135 

5 



6 



CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER VIII. page 
Religion in Secular Life x 5 6 

CHAPTER IX. 
Religion in the Family l8 7 

CHAPTER X. 
Religion Always and Everywhere 213 

CHAPTER XI. 
Conclusion 2 3* 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



CHAPTER I. 

INTR OD UC TOR Y. 

AS the Scriptures employ the phrase 
L " confessing Christ" to describe the 
assuming of a religious character and life, 
they very naturally employ the correspond- 
ing phrase " following Christ" to describe 
:he exhibition of such a character and the 
prosecution of such a life. In adopting re- 
ligion under the direction of the Bible, a 
man attaches himself to Christ; in practicing 
religion under the same direction, he follows 
Christ. We may be thankful that a proce- 
dure so critical in its nature, and so momen- 
tous in its bearings and issues as this latter 
one must needs be, has been set before us 
by God in terms so simple and intelligible. 
Jesus constructed no formal system of 



8 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



doctrine and enacted no formal code of 
moral law, but he comprehended both in 
the injunction "Follow me." Light suf- 
ficient for the world is concentrated in 
this single luminous point. 

Every honest person, in embracing a 
religious character and life, will desire 
above all things to know what is precise- 
ly included in the great obligation he has 
assumed. He will desire this for two 
reasons: firsts that he may be sure that 
nothing properly belonging to its contents 
has been overlooked; and second, that hs 
may be sure, at the same time, that nothing 
apart from or beyond those contents has 
been imposed upon him. The position 
of one who by proper acknowledgments 
before the authorities of the church, and 
by a participation in the covenanting ordi- 
nances of baptism and the Lord's Supper, 
has just taken the step which attests the 
faith and avows the purpose of a Christian, 
must be an unspeakably solemn one to the 
party concerned; and one which every 
thoughtful observer will look upon with 
the profoundest interest and the tenderest 



INTRODUCTORY. 



9 



solicitude. If it means what it ought to 
mean, it presents us with that spectacle of 
a sinner repenting and turning from his 
evil ways over which the angels of God 
rejoice in heaven. It is the return to the 
Father's house of a wandering prodigal 
to whom every right-minded " elder son " 
will be ready to extend a loving welcome. 
It is the enlistment of a new recruit in the 
army of Christ — an act which surely should 
appeal with a pathetic power to the heart 
of every veteran in that army. 

Young soldier, you have done a brave 
deed — a deed which many a man who has 
courage enough to face death on the battle- 
field does not dare to do. You have dared 
to confess that your life heretofore has been 
all wrong, and to determine that in future 
it shall by God's help be made right. You 
have dared to change masters, to change 
principles, to change habits. You have 
rescued yourself from the thraldom of sin ; 
you have broken loose from the appetites 
with which it had enslaved you and the 
associations with which it had entangled 
you. You have renounced all other lords 



10 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



which have had dominion over you to bow 
the knee to Jesus. 

The struggle by which you have done 
all this may have been great ; the severity 
of it reveals itself in the sobriety of your 
manner and the seriousness of your coun- 
tenance. A deeper shade still gathers 
over your spirit as you think of the 
struggles to come — as you contemplate 
the responsibilities which are involved in 
the steps which yet lie before you. The 
apprehension of failure or of defection in 
the work you have undertaken fills you 
with alarm. Shall the peace, the hope, the 
joy, of a new life which are now stirring 
in 'your soul be stifled and lost? Shall the 
Lord ever have occasion to look upon you 
as he did upon Peter, and reproach you for 
your unfaithfulness and treachery ? Shall 
the friends in Christ to whom you have 
now joined yourself be constrained in 
time to come to mourn over your back- 
sliding ? And shall the unbelieving crowd 
whom you have professedly abandoned 
have cause to rejoice over your halting? 
To all such questions you now make the 



INTRODUCTORY. 



I I 



almost passionate reply, " God forbid !" 
The very gravity of your demeanor, the 
intensity of desire and purpose which kin- 
dles the very look of your eye, seem to 
make a mute appeal to others more ad- 
vanced in Christian life to instruct your 
ignorance and brace up your feebleness — 
to tell you, in a word, what you must be 
and what you must do in order to realize 
the character you have assumed and the 
life you have undertaken to enact. 

In the spirit of sympathy with this mute 
appeal (which in many instances has been 
addressed to the writer as a spoken one) 
the following pages have been prepared. 
In the preparation of them the keynote 
with which everything will be kept in har- 
mony is the great comprehensive command, 
the first (Matt. iv. 19) and the last (John 
xxi. 22) addressed by Christ to his dis- 
ciples, " Follow me." It is evidently enough 
for the disciple that he be "as his Master," 
and for the servant that he be "as his Lord" 
(Matt. x. 25). The religion of Christianity 
requires just this likeness to Christ — all 
this, and nothing more than this. 



12 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

The exposition of this cardinal law 
of the Christian life, it is hoped, will fur- 
nish a seasonable aid to that favored class 
of persons who through God's blessing 
upon faithful parental training have by 
imperceptible steps been brought into 
his kingdom. Divine grace, in the nature 
of it, is without limitation as to the time 
and manner of its operation. It is the 
privilege of all who are themselves in 
covenant with God to believe that their 
offspring may be included with them in 
the provisions of the covenant. They often 
give evidence that they are. In such cases 
the birth of the Spirit has supervened upon 
the birth of the flesh at so early a day, 
and by such insensible processes, that the 
subject has no consciousness of the re- 
generating change. But the obligations 
of the Christian life are the same in the 
case of those who are thus called from 
the womb as in that of those who are 
converted in later life. The import of 
these obligations will present itself to the 
intelligence of these persons, as well as 
of others, when the time arrives for them 



INTRODUCTORY. 



1 3 



to avow their faith in Christ and their 
consecration to God by a formal union 
with the Church. To them, as well as 
to others who have been recalled from 
the open paths of unbelief and sin, Jesus 
says, " Follow me," The counsels which 
befit the latter class may be as diligently 
studied and as carefully observed by them. 
The Spirit of Christ in the soul of a be- 
liever will manifest its presence by the 
same phenomena in the case of a Samuel 
sanctified from his birth as in that of a Saul 
arrested by sovereign grace in a career of 
flagrant opposition to Christ. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE TRUE CONCEPTION OF RELIGIOUS 
LIVING. 

THE sincere professor of the religion 
of Christ will mean something very 
definite by the profession which he has 
made. If in all enterprises it is requisite 
that a man should have a clear idea of 
what he is doing, it is especially requisite 
in the practice of religion, confessedly the 
most important enterprise in which man 
can engage. No one has ever risen to 
the grandeur of a Christian life who has 
not felt the necessity of intelligently and 
deliberately weighing and measuring the 
import of such a life. 

"Which of you " asks the Saviour (Luke 
xiv. 28), "intending to build a tower, sit- 
teth not down first and counteth the cost, 
whether he have sufficient to finish it? 
Lest haply, after he hath laid the founda- 
u 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



tion and is not able to finish it, all that 
behold it begin to mock him, saying, This 
man began to build, and was not able to 
finish. Or what king, going to make war 
with another king, sitteth not down first and 
consulteth whether he be able with ten 
thousand to meet him that cometh against 
him with twenty thousand ?" With the 
breadth and the closeness of circumspec- 
tion indicated by these operations the 
young Christian ought to scrutinize the 
nature, the scope and the aim of the 
movement in which he is embarking-. 

Who would start upon a journey with- 
out having a destination in view, or with- 
out endeavoring to foresee and provide 
for all the conditions necessary for a sure 
and safe transit to the desired point, and 
for the attainment of the objects proposed 
in the purpose to visit it ? 

A recent traveler, in a work describing 
a tour around the world, tells us that " he 
had planned his entire excursion several 
months before setting out, with the times 
of arrival and departure for each country 
that he expected to visit; and until reach- 



x 6 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

ing Europe, where his plans were inten- 
tionally left uncertain, he was scarcely a 
day out of time at any stage of the jour- 
ney." Of course such a journey was 
wisely and successfully made ; the traveler 
accomplished just what he intended to do. 
The traveler upon the Christian life can 
hope for a satisfactory issue to his under- 
taking only by exercising the same fore- 
thought. Standing within the threshold 
of the Church, with a future consecrated 
to Christ before him, the earnest inquiry 
of his soul ought to be, and will be if he 
is a true man, " Lord, what wilt thou have 

me to do?" 

That there are deliberate dissemblers 
and hypocrites in the Church is undoubted- 
ly true, but such cases are extremely rare. 
Ordinarily, those who formally make a pro- 
fession of religion are sincere. It may 
happen that the act has been performed 
under an emotional excitement, and that 
after the transient inspiration has subsided 
the individual has relapsed into his old 
form of life, but still he was sincere when 
the profession was made. He was deceived 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



in persuading himself that he was a subject 
of regenerating grace, but he was honest 
in entertaining the persuasion. Simon 
Magus even (Acts viii, 13) gives evidence 
of being honest when he professed faith 
and received baptism as a disciple of Jesus, 
though he afterward showed that his " heart 
was not right in the sight of God/' 

If the genuine principle of spiritual life 
is in the newly-enlisted church-member, he 
will be honest not only in the persuasion 
that he is a Christian, but in the sense of 
desiring to know and meaning to be and 
to do all that is implied in the name and 
character of a Christian. Whither this 
journey upon which he has entered is to 
lead him, and what is involved in the prose- 
cution of it, are the anxious and absorbing 
inquiries which his mind will be constrained 
to revolve. On these inquiries a few re- 
flections which I shall proceed to offer 
may throw light. 

L 

It is evident that the idea of religious 
living, as given in the phrase " Following 



1 3 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

Christ," includes vastly more than a mere 
external religiousness or the putting on of 
a religious manner and the practicing of a 
certain set of religious acts and rites. 

A religion of the look, the tone, the 
dress, the outward ceremonial, has received 
the distinctive name of " sanctimonious- 
ness "—an opprobrious term by which 
the world has denounced a religion of 
form and appearance as a spurious re- 
ligion. Real religion is a property ot 
the man himself. It is not made by the 
draperv he wears, or the dialect he uses, 
or the'societv to which he attaches him- 
self. The follower of Christ will change 
his ways because he is a Christian, not in 
order to become a Christian. 

Even under the Old Dispensation, where 
external signs of membership in the Church 
were so largely enjoined, the principle was 
distinctly announced (i Sam. xvi. 7) : "The 
Lord seeth not as man seeth ; for man 
looketh on the outward appearance, but 
the Lord looketh on the heart." No right- 
minded professor of religion will delude 
himself with the idea that his vow of dis- 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



1 9 



cipleship is fulfilled by the putting on of a 
religious demeanor or the doing merely 
the things which religious people ordinarily 
do. He will feel that he meant vastly 
more than pledging himself to appear in 
the house of God on the Sabbath, to 
repeat two or three prayers a day, to come 
to the communion-table at the stated times, 
to subscribe for a missionary paper, to 
drop his contribution into the collection- 
box and to vote at a church-meetino- when 
he pledged himself to follow Christ. He 
will know that there is no " keeping of 
the words" of Christ without "loving" 
Christ (John xiv. 23), and love puts the 
consecration of the heart at the root of 
acts of devotion. 

Religion, it is true, like every other strong 
spiritual force introduced into a man, may 
be expected to impress itself more or less 
upon his manner and conduct. In some 
instances it may effect a total transforma- 
tion of character, as in the case of St. Paul, 
changing the lion into the lamb. It cer- 
tainly will make the man who has been 
neglectful of religious customs and ob- 



20 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

servances attentive to them ; it will mani- 
fest its presence in the soul by this outward 
sicm But a sign is not identical with the 
thin* it represents; the fruit of a tree is 
not the tree nor the life of the tree. 

There may be the sign of religion where 
there is no religion. The Jews in Isaiah s 
time (Isa. L) were scrupulous in keeping 
their festivals, bringing their oblations and 
offering up their prayers, and yet in the 
sight of God there was "no soundness in 
them" The Pharisees in our Saviours 
time made themselves conspicuous by their 
badges of piety, but were likened by him 
to « whited sepulchres." The mere calling 
Christ « Lord, Lord," or the acknowledging 
him by any other symbolical act, does not 
make a man a member of the kingdom of 
heaven (Mat, vii. 2i.) 

of Christ, in espousing a religious life, will 
not mistake the wearing of a church uni- 
form or the practicing of a church drill 
for such a life. It is not the new garb, 
but the new heart-not the form of godli- 
ness, but the spirit of it-which is required 
for the following of Jesus. 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



21 



II. 

Nor is the act of entering into church- 
membership to be regarded as a mere 
induction into a corporation and a sub- 
scription to the laws of that corporation. 

Men have found it convenient or neces- 
sary in the prosecution of a variety of 
objects to unite themselves under a social 
compact or constitution ; they thus form a 
league or confederation for a special pur- 
pose. There must be, of course, in every 
such league or confederation, a set of laws 
bearing upon the object proposed by it, by 
which every person entering it is bound. By 
this his duty as a member of it is limited and 
defined. A temperance society, for instance, 
adopts its rules with a view to the promotion 
of temperance, and he who joins it engages 
to observe these rules. So long as this is 
done all is done that is required of him. 
To put the church in the same category 
with a temperance society, and to construe 
the phrase " joining the church'' as signify- 
ing the same kind of act as the joining of 
such a society, is a fundamental mistake. 
In becoming a church-member a man is, 



FOLLO WING CHRIS T. 



indeed, entering a social body and placing 
himself, to a certain extent, under the 
obligations involved in the constitution of 
that body. The church is the house of 
God, and, like every other house, it must 
have its peculiar economy— that is, its 
house-law. This house-law, which sets cer- 
tain objects before the church and pre- 
scribes certain rules and methods for the 
attainment of them, requires organization 
and concerted effort on the part ol the 
members. The worship of God, for in- 
stance, is to be maintained in the world, 
and this creates a necessity for a num- 
ber of practical arrangements involving 
an exercise of deliberation and an ex- 
penditure of money in which every mem- 
ber must share. It is his duty in his 
measure to do whatever the church as a 
body is required to do, and a duty which 
he owes to the body ; so that his fellow- 
members are wronged whenever he fails 
to do it. 

But no intelligent disciple of Christ 
would for a moment substitute compliance 
with this house-law of the church for obe- 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



23 



dience to the law of God, or feel that in 
discharging his duty to the corporation of 
which he was a member he had acquitted 
himself of his obligations as a follower of 
Christ. His social life as a church-member 
is only one department — and a lower one 
— of that religious life which he is bound 
to lead as a Christian ; and if his aim is 
only to do the will of his brethren, he has 
failed to recognize the first principle of 
religious living, which is to do the will of 
his Father in heaven. To stand well and 
to have a fair report among those with 
whom he has associated himself in church- 
fellowship is an end which every professor 
of religion ought to keep in view ; but if his 
purpose contemplates no higher end than 
this, it will certainly never realize itself in 
making him a follower of Christ. 

. . III. 

As mere conformity to church-regula- 
tions is not the rule of religious living, 
neither is union with the church to be 
made the ground upon which the Christian 
rests his expectation of spiritual blessings, 



24 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



The church cannot do the work of 
Christ; it cannot regenerate nor sanctify 
nor save. It is not a divinely-instituted 
insurance-company, pledging itself, in con- 
sideration of their compliance with certain 
terms of membership, to protect its sub- 
scribers from all spiritual loss and damage. 
Under some theories, conspicuously the 
Romish, this idea is unquestionably the 
cardinal one. The Church is represented as 
a mother, assuming the custody and guaran- 
teeing the salvation of all who put them- 
selves under her charge. It is held forth 
as an asylum within whose sacred enclosure 
the inmate will be shielded from the pur- 
suit of law and furnished with all the aids 
of erace. Let the church-member, it is 
said, implicitly accept the teachings of the 
Church and regularly comply with its or- 
dinances, and the Church pledges to him 
an assured interest in all .the privileges of 
the kingdom of heaven. 

This is simply a modification of the old 
Jewish doctrine which identified religion 
with relationship to Abraham—a doctrine 
which John the Baptist denounced when he 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



2 5 



cried (Matt iii. 9), " Think not to say 
within yourselves, We have Abraham to 
our father, for I say unto you that God is 
able of these stones to raise up children 
unto Abraham ;" and which the Saviour 
condemned when he said (Matt. viii. 11), 
" Many shall come from the east and the 
west, and sit down with Abraham and 
Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; 
but the children of the kingdom shall be 
cast out into outer darkness/' It is the 
prerogative of Christ personally to forgive 
sin, to reconcile the soul to God and to 
bestow eternal life ; and he has never 
delegated this prerogative to his Church, 
and no policy or certificate that church 
authorities can issue is of any worth un- 
less Christ has first pronounced the believ- 
er forgiven and justified. The man who 
puts dependence upon a Church in the 
place of following Christ is indulging a 
fatal delusion. 

IV. 

In distinction from these low and super 
ficial views of a religious life the Bible 



26 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



places the foundation and source of it in 
a new nature. It represents the Christian, 
not as an old creature rehabilitated and 
newly shaped and labeled, but as a new 
creature specifically, one quickened by a 
new principle and reanimated and ener- 
gized by a new spirit (2 Cor. v. 17. Rom. 
viii. 9). 

The term " religious living " simply 
means the religious man living. If the 
church-member in entering upon a course 
of religious living has made a change in 
his mode of living, it is because he has 
himself undergone a change of nature, or 
what our Lord calls (John iii. 3) a new 
birth. The change in the outward and 
demonstrative is merely the sequel of a 
chano-e which has occurred within him. 
By this change the carnal mind by which 
he was previously governed has given 
place, through faith in Christ, to a spiritual 
mind; love to God has been elevated 
above love to the creature, and all the 
minor affections are embraced and con- 
trolled by this predominant one. The law 
by which the believer's living is now 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 2J 



directed and ordered requires him to be 
religious and forbids him to be anything 
else. " How shall we that are dead to sin," 
asks St. Paul (Rom. vi. 2), " live any 
longer therein ?" How can the man in 
whose nature love to God has been im- 
planted as the reigning principle be any- 
thing but a religious man in his living? 
As well might we ask, " How can the star 
be a star without shining?" or, "How can 
a fruit tree be a fruit tree without bearing 
fruit?" 

Religious living is expressed not so 
much by the phrase "I do" as by the 
phrase " I am ;" consequently, in making 
a profession of religion the man is making 
a promise, not to do certain specified 
things, but to be in all things a certain 
definite character. He purposes and he 
pledges himself to be at all times and in 
all circumstances a Christian man. In 
private as well as in public, in secular 
transactions as well as sacred ones, on 
weekdays as well as on the Sabbath, 
outside of the church as well as in it, he 
recognizes the obligation as resting upon 



2 8 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

him to exhibit the nature of one born of 
God. 

V. 

A Christian life, conducted under the 
promptings of this new nature, will express 
itself actively in a species of working cor- 
responding to this nature. 

Every honest professor of religion will 
feel that he has bound himself by a solemn 
indenture to be a worker for God. It is 
only under this form that his living can 
claim to be a following of Christ, for 
Christ affirms of himself (John vi. 38), "I 
came down from heaven, not to do mine 
own will, but the will of him that sent me." 
Put the term "business" here in this pas- 
sage in the place of the term " will," as we 
may properly do, and it will teach that in 
the believer's scheme of life God's business 
must take precedence of his own. 

The privileges of the gospel can never 
be divorced from the duties of the gospel. 
The faith that receives Christ as a Saviour 
will receive him also as a Master. " Freely 
ye have received," as a statement of gratu- 
itous blessings conferred, must always 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING, 



2 9 



stand conjoined in the policy of the Chris- 
tian with the injunction " Freely give." 
We are engrafted into Christ by the divine 
Husbandman not merely that we may live, 
but that we may give evidence of our liv- 
ing by our acting or working. " Herein 
is my Father glorified/' says the Lord 
(John xv. 8), "that ye bear much fruit; so 
shall ye be my disciples." 

The " high calling " which every follower 
of Jesus has received binds him to make 
the glory of God the chief end of his liv- 
ing. He is the servant entrusted with 
special talents by his Lord, and the com- 
mand " Occupy " — trade with these — " till 
I come " accompanies the trust. "Always 
abounding in the work of the Lord " is 
a definition of, as well as a precept to, the 
Christian. He is to "work out his own sal- 
vation," or to prove himself to be in a state 
of salvation by his working. He is to "min- 
ister," as his Master did, to the good of 
others. He is to show his love to God by 
his love to his brethren. He is to pray for 
the coming of the kingdom of God, and to 
show that his praying is sincere by working 



3 o FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

for the coming of that kingdom. He is to 
make his light so positively and conspicu- 
ously shine that all in the house may see it. 
He is to travel with hourly diligence and with 
lifelong effort to the promised land, not be 
borne there in his luxurious car without a 
care or a movement of his own. 

The relation of all other avocations to the 
supreme one of working for Christ is well 
stated by an eminent living minister in the 
pithy questions, "Is religion your business, 
or business your religion ? Does your candle 
shine upon the bushel, or does the bushel hide 
your candle ?" When Christ gives the com- 
mand " Follow me," he imposes an obliga- 
tion which involves in it the forsaking of all 
for his sake. Henceforth the business of 
God outranks and holds in subordination 
to itself all other exercises of life in the 
believer. 

VI. 

Religious living, furthermore, is to be 
conceived of as 'the carrying out of the 
eno-ao-ements of a covenant between the 

soul and God. 

Whatever may be the form of the pro- 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



3 1 



cess, no man becomes a Christian man with- 
out making a covenant with God. It may be 
expressed in literal terms. Dr. Doddridge 
has inserted such a covenant in his Rise 
and Progress of Religion in the Soul for 
the use of persons adopting a religious 
life. If this is not done literally, it is done 
virtually, by every one who embraces such 
a life. 

The form of this covenant in Old-Testa- 
ment times is stated by Isaiah (xxiii. 13) : 
" O Lord our God, other lords beside thee 
have had dominion over us ; but by thee 
only will we make mention of thy name." 
An example of it is given in Josh. xxiv. 22- 
26. After drawing from the people a pro- 
fession of their allegiance to God, Joshua 
seals, as it were, the covenant into which 
they had entered by setting up a great 
stone under an oak that was near the 
sanctuary of the Lord and saying to the 
people, " Behold, this stone shall be a 
witness unto us, for it hath heard all the 
words of the Lord which he spake unto 
us ; it shall be, therefore, a witness unto 
you, lest ye deny your God." 



32 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

In the New Testament this covenant is 
described or suggested in various forms, 
as in these passages : " Ye also are become 
dead to the law by the body of Christ, that 
ye should be married to another, even to 
him who is raised from the dead, that we 
should bring forth fruit unto God" (Rom. 
vii. 4) ; " Ye who were without Christ, 
being aliens from the commonwealth of 
Israel and strangers from the covenant 
of promise, having no hope and without 
God in the world, now, in Christ Jesus, 
are made nigh by the blood of Christ" 
(Eph. ii. 12, 13) ; and " I have espoused you 
to one husband, that I may present you as 
a chaste virgin to Christ" (2 Cor. xi. 2). 

Baptism and the Lord's Supper are 
essentially covenanting transactions. They 
are modes by which faith in Christ as the 
Prophet, the Priest and the King of the 
people of God is professed by the party 
engaging in them. If they mean anything, 
they & mean that that party is by these 
solemn rites binding himself to make 
Christ in fact his Prophet, his Priest and 
his Kino-. And these ordinances, being 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 



33 



direct and positive institutions of God, 
have in them all the significance of a 
pledge or a seal on God's part that the 
blessings secured by the threefold work 
of Christ shall be conferred upon him. 

All covenanting is a serious procedure, 
but in covenanting with God the proced- 
ure reaches a climax in both force and ex- 
tent. The man's true self and his whole 
self must be conveyed to God in it; all 
other interests and obligations must be 
covered by it. All the countless circles 
through which life revolves — personal, do- 
mestic, political — must be included in and 
bounded by that supreme one which passes 
between the soul and God. 

VII. 

As a consequence of this last fact, 
Christian living is to be conceived of as 
the carrying out of a vow of consecration 
to God. 

If it be a following of Christ, it must 
have a constant reference to the redemp- 
tion of Christ as the source of both its 
motive and its rule. Now, an act, a life, 

3 



34 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

of self-devotement on his part is clearly 
the only proportionate acknowledgment 
which the believer can make to that un- 
speakable demonstration of his love to 
him which God has made in the gospel. 
It is the response on man's side— and the 
only one possible— which corresponds with 
the call addressed to him on God's side 
As every Christian has been bought with 
a price, even "the precious blood of 
Christ" (i Pet. i. 19). he is no longer his 
own, but belongs to Him who died for him 
and rose again. A child of wrath by 
nature, even as others, he has become 
in Christ a child of God. As such he 
must yield himself in all respects to the 
demands of this sacred relationship. As 
such he must freely assent to the absolute 
claim which God has to the service of his 
life He must present himself, soul, body 
and spirit, as a living sacrifice to him. _ He 
must regard himself as charged with a 
"holy priesthood," and as such separated 
to the work of showing forth the praises 
of Him who has called him unto his king- 
dom and glory. 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 35 

When Christ prayed for the disciples 
(John xvii. 1 7) that they might be " sanc- 
tified " through the truth, he prayed that 
they might be so consecrated to a priestly 
life. As for their sakes he had so sancti- 
fied himself, or devoted himself to the 
doing of the Father's will, so he invoked 
upon them the grace which should enable 
them, as his followers, to realize the same 
consecrated spirit. 

The apostles continually press the same 
idea upon their readers as the cardinal 
principle of Christian piety, as in those 
impassioned appeals of St. Paul to the 
Corinthians (2 Cor. vi. 14-18) : " What fel- 
lowship hath righteousness with unright- 
eousness ? And what communion hath 
light with darkness ? And what concord 
hath Christ with Belial ? Or what part 
hath he that believeth with an infidel ? 
And what agreement hath the temple of 
God with idols ? For ye are the temple 
of the living God ; as God hath said, I will 
dwell in them and walk in them ; and I will 
be their God, and they shall be my people. 
Wherefore come out from among them, and 



36 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch 
not the unclean thing; and I will receive 
you and will be a Father unto you, and you 
shall be my sons and daughters, saith the 
Lord Almighty." 

The honest professor of religion will 
understand the thoroughness of the self- 
devotement involved in the act of profes- 
sion. He will forsake all to follow Christ, 
and in the surrender will make no reserve 
—will keep back no part of the price. 

VIII. 

These views of the Christian life, deep 
and far-reaching as they are, certainly cor- 
respond with the form of that life presented 
in the Scriptures. They must be true if 
the Christian religion has anything of the 
significance ascribed to it by the inspired 
writers. 

It cannot be safe to reject them as ex- 
travagant or fanatical, for that would be to 
charge the Saviour and his apostles with 
misleading and trifling with the souls they 
are evidently so anxious to guide into the 
way of life. It cannot be safe to follow 



TRUE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 37 

the lower standards of religious living 
which may be common among professed 
Christians, for that would be to put the 
human idea of religion in the place of the 
divine. 

O believer, see to it that these views are 
well weighed and deliberately accepted in 
making your profession of religion ! Mis- 
takes in your negotiations with God must 
be fatal to the whole transaction. Fair- 
dealing is the only kind of dealing which 
can have success with him, and fair-dealing 
here requires that your true self, and your 
whole self, should be given to him when 
you profess to become his servant. 

Remember, it is your soul which you are 
seeking to save, your soul which Christ 
died to redeem, your soul which the Holy 
Spirit is employed in sanctifying. It is 
with the soul that you must realize and 
express your religion. Unless the soul 
has been united to Christ, there is no life 
in you ; unless the soul has uttered itself 
in your vows of church-membership, they 
have been an empty form ; unless the soul 
has gone with your sacramental acts, there 



38 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

is no meaning in them. It would have 
been better if they had never been per- 
formed, for they have been but a semblance 
and a pretence. Your religious life, if such 
it can be called, will be a heartless and 
mechanical servitude without consistency 
or effectiveness, without value in the sight 
of God and without comfort to yourself. 
To enter the church with any other views 
than those which have been described will 
be to entail upon you the misery of at- 
tempting to serve two masters, will expose 
you to endless self-contradictions, and will 
leave you, like the branch that abideth not 
in the vine, to be ultimately withered, cast 
out and burned in the fire. 



CHAPTER III. 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING, 

A RELIGIOUS life is one which at all 
points maintains a contact and a 
communication with God. 

That " God is not in all his thoughts " 
(Ps. x. 4) is the definition of an irreligious 
man. The reverse is true of the religious 
man : God is in all his thoughts ; the law 
of the Lord is his meditation day and 
night. The motive, the purpose, the act, 
which is not coupled with faith in God and 
does not recognize his authority, however 
good and commendable it may be under 
certain aspects, is not religious. Every 
step in religious living must be taken, so 
to speak, in company with God, and must 
help to form a walk with God. Following 
Christ is at the same time a " walking in 
him" (Col. ii. 6). 

It is of the first importance to the Chris- 



40 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



tian — indeed, it is the very condition of his 
spiritual health and progress — that he 
should be kept consciously and intelli- 
gently under the influence of this associa- 
tion with God in Christ Hence, in seek- 
ing for a rule for his religious life he must 
assure himself that everything which it 
contains expresses the mind of God and 
is accompanied by the authority of God. 

The conscience is enfeebled and vitiated 
just in proportion as it admits the right of 
any other sovereign to control it. The 
religious affections become morbid and 
fantastic whenever they are stimulated by 
merely human excitements or directed 
through merely human channels. The 
proper vital element of the soul is the 
" inspiration of the Almighty." The in- 
spiration of man is a source of disease and 
corruption, just as the body is sustained by 
the pure atmospheric air breathed down 
upon it from the regions above, and sickens 
when exposed to the mephitic gases which 
spring from the earth beneath. To usurp 
the prerogative of God and arbitrarily to 
burden the consciences of men with a 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 41 

schedule of duties of its own invention, as 
the Romish Church has done, is to bring 
the minds of its subjects into the grossest 
bondage and to expose them to the va- 
garies of a blind superstition. To teach, 
for instance, that holiness, which is the 
essential attribute of God, and which 
attaches only to things which he has seen 
fit to associate with himself, is attached to 
places and times and relics, is to break the 
bond of faith by which the soul is kept in 
union with God and to make it the victim 
of an indefinite credulity. From such a 
debasing apostasy as this Christ came to 
deliver his followers, and therefore he 
taught them that the true worshipers of 
God are those who worship him, not by 
frequenting certain shrines or observing 
certain rites, but " in spirit and in truth 
and that the keeping of the traditions of 
men is practically a rejecting of the com- 
mandments of God (Mark vii. 9). 

I. 

It is clear, therefore, that the Christian 
is to seek his great rule of living in the 



42 



FOLLOWING CHRIST*. 



Bible. From the character which is as- 
sumed by that book as the "word of God" 
and the " law of the Lord/' it exactly fills 
the place which is required of anything 
which claims to be a rule of religious liv- 
ing, and a place which nothing else claim- 
ing to be such a rule can fill. Whatever 
the Bible enjoins as right or forbids as 
wrong is presented to the believer as ri g-ht 
or wrong in the judgment of God ; he ac- 
cepts it as right or wrong on the direct 
ground of God's authority. This authority 
is legitimate ; in acknowledging it the soul 
is acting both rationally and religiously. 

The adequacy of the Bible as a rule of 
life is also complete. It is one of the 
strongest proofs that it is the product of 
a divine Mind that it is so constructed as 
to meet all the requirements of a directory 
for all men in following Christ. It ac- 
complishes its objects in a manner which 
is thorough and peculiar to itself. It does 
not propound a code of formal laws pre- 
scribing by what particular acts a man is to 
serve God or by what set of doings or not- 
doings he is to prove himself a Christian 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 43 

man. From the outset it draws a distinc- 
tion between "the letter " and " the spirit." 
It acts upon the principle that you must 
make the tree good before you can expect 
the fruit to be good. If it writes the ten 
commandments on visible tablets of stone, 
it shows that they all hang upon the law, 
" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with 
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy mind" (Matt. xxii. 37). It 
begins its work of regulating the life of 
the man by regulating the affections and 
dispositions that lie within him, so that his 
supreme desire shall be to do the will of 
his Father in heaven. It purges the eye 
of the traveler before it sets before him 
the map from which he is to learn his way. 
As the Saviour teaches (John vii. 17), it is 
the man who " wills " — that is, wishes — to 
do God's will to whom the doctrine, the 
positive law, of God becomes intelligible 
and authoritative. 

The Bible next to such a willing mind 
communicates such a conception of the 
character and mind of God as makes it 
easy for the believer to determine in all 



44 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



cases and at all seasons what his will must 
be. The Bible is from first to last a rev- 
elation of God. The faithful student of 
it grows in the knowledge of God from 
day to day ; and, as God is the embodiment 
of all the elements and principles of recti- 
tude, the knowledge of him is identical 
with a knowledge of these elements and 
principles. In the light of them the hon- 
est seeker can always find the path of duty. 
He does not need, like the man walking 
through the intricate streets of a city by 
night, to track his way by the blaze of a 
series of lamps, but it lies before him 
clearly defined in the broad sunlight by 
which the whole scene around him is 
illumined. 

Once more, the Bible does its work by 
keeping the mind of the follower of Christ 
always directly under the wholesome in- 
fluence of God's immediate presence and 
guidance. As it is the attractive property 
of the magnet which keeps the needle 
pointing to it, so the soul, under the im- 
pressions communicated to it by God's 
word, is pervaded with a spiritual suscepti- 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 45 



bility or tractability of temper toward God 
which makes it almost spontaneously re- 
spond to every intimation of his will. Thus 
Jesus says (John vi. 44) that it is through a 
"drawing" of the Father that any man 
comes to him. It is this habitual or in- 
stinctive cleaving of the soul to God — this 
" following hard after him," as the Psalmist 
calls it (Ps. lxiii. 8) — which keeps the 
Christian in the right ways of God and 
protects him from converting religious liv- 
ing into a mere self-imposed will-worship 
on the one hand, or a mere mechanical rit- 
ualism on the other. 

To the question, therefore, " By what 
rule am I to regulate my conduct?" which 
the professor of religion will naturally ask, 
and ought to ask, I would answer, The 
Bible. Take that as the "man of your 
counsel," and use other guides only as 
aids to your knowledge of that. The 
Bible, if studied with the simple desire 
to know the will of God and with a fair 
and intelligent application of its teachings, 
will give you all the light you need. What- 
ever formal rules you may see fit to adopt 



46 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

must be drawn from this source, or they 
can have no authority over you. By going 
to the original fountain you will be kept 
most sensibly under the very law of God, 
and, furthermore, will be sufficiently thrown 
upon your own vigilance and discretion to 
keep your sense of responsibility for the 
manner of your living in habitual and 
healthy exercise. 

Be, then, above all things, if you wish to 
be a genuine follower of Christ, a student 
of the Bible. And by the term " student " 
here I mean much more than a mere 
reader. The distinction between these 
terms I shall endeavor to point out in 
the following remarks. 

II. 

In order to study the Bible, it must be 
read with a purpose or for the sake of a 
definite benefit. 

An aimless or vagrant reading of God's 
word, or the reading of it without an object 
to which the reading of it is to introduce 
us, is as futile an effort of mind as would 
be the repeating of so many words in an 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 47 



unknown tongue. To read the Bible with 
the expectation that the mere act is to 
aid us is to treat it as we would a charm. 
It is the same kind of act as that of the 
Romanist when he kisses a crucifix or 
sprinkles himself with holy water. The 
Bible is to be consulted for the purpose of 
learning from it how God is to be pleased 
or how Christ is to be followed; its use 
consists in its fitness and ability to give 
this knowledge. If nothing is sought from 
it, nothing will be gained. The connection 
which our Lord so emphatically noticed 
between the acts of seeking and finding, 
asking and receiving, knocking and the 
opening of a door, applies to the study of 
the Bible. To find anything in it, there 
must be a seeking; to receive anything 
from it, there must be an asking ; to gain 
access to its contents, there must be a 
knocking. If the professing Christian be 
honest in his profession, he will be able to 
give an answer to the question, " Why do 
you read your Bible ?" It will be, " Because 
I wish to learn how I am to live as a 
Christian ; because I earnestly desire to 



4 g FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

acquire all the instruction within my reach 
in regard to the type of character and the 
manner of life which befit me as a Chris- 
tian." Such a one will crave such infor- 
mation as the Bible contains just as a hun- 
gry man craves food. His craving for the 
truth which acquaints him with God and 
his will will have in it all the distinctness 
and force of an appetite. This appetite he 
will bring with him to the Scriptures when- 
ever he reads them. And Scripture truth 
will have a relish in it corresponding to 
this appetite. It may be taken as a sign 
of a decline in the spiritual health of any 
Christian when this relish for the Bible 
declines. The difference between a spirit- 
ual mind and a worldly mind evinces itself 
in one prominent way in this— that, while 
the latter desires not the knowledge of 
God the former esteems such knowledge 
to be supremely valuable and is attracted 
to it by an instinctive affection. 

If love to God be in the soul, as it must 
be in the case of the true believer, it will 
express itself as naturally as in any con- 
ceivable way, by a habit of reading the 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 49 

Bible, and reading it specifically for the pur- 
pose of gaining a better acquaintance with 
God. The Bible will be taken up with a 
definite desire to learn something from it, 
and will be laid down with the inquiries, 
" What have I learned ? What new views 
of truth have been acquired ? What pre- 
vious ones have been confirmed ? What 
new emotions have been awakened, or 
what familiar ones have been quickened, 
by this reading of it ?" The remark often 
made, "I read my Bible daily," or "I read 
so much of it statedly," means nothing un- 
less it means that the reading has been 
conducted with direct reference to the 
spiritual profiting of the reader. The 
eyes that, seeing, see not, and the ears 
that, hearing, hear not, the things which 
God has revealed are marks of the rep- 
robate, not of the child of God. 

IIL 

The Bible is to be studied in a reveren- 
tial spirit. 

Every application of the mind to it is an 
exercise as truly devotional as prayer ; it 



5 q FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

is literally communing with God. Those 
formulas, "Thus saith the Lord, Thus 
spake the Spirit" or "the Holy Ghost, 
which are so frequent in the Scriptures, 
affirm that the reader is brought by these 
Scriptures into direct communication with 
the mind of God. The effect of this con- 
viction ought to be to invest ^ Bible wrth 
a sacredness which cannot possibly attach 
to any merely human composition Any- 
thing which serves to address the soul, 
however remotely, as a voice from God- 
as some of the stupendous objects or 
startling phenomena of nature-irresist- 
ibly suffuses it with a feeling of awe. The 
Bible is that voice speaking in articulate 
tones The character which it claims for 
itself is that it is, as to the contents of it 
or the things which it reveals and teaches 
a direct utterance from God. Moses and 
the prophets wrote it, but they wrote it by 
the command of God and for the purpose 
of giving to men the knowledge which 
God thought it necessary for them to 
possess; and the testimony which it gives, 
according to the Saviour's emphatic dec- 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 5 I 

laration (Luke xvi. 31), is entitled to a 
credit greater than that which would be 
due to one risen from the dead. What the 
reader of the Bible needs is always to 
have the sense of its sacredness present to 
his mind. The impressions left by its 
teaching will be genuine only when made 
with the aid and through the medium of 
this sense. God's voice will not have the 
effect of God's voice if it be not consciously 
recognized as his voice. It is the intelli- 
gent apprehension of this feature in the 
Bible that it is God's voice speaking to the 
reader which will make the use of it a real 
converse with God. 

Now, this sense of the sacredness of the 
Bible is something which the man who 
seeks to find in it a rule of religious 
living must religiously cherish and culti- 
vate. Familiarity with any object is known 
— even to a proverb — to abate the feeling 
of reverence with which it was at first 
regarded. And then the elevated frame 
of mind — the strain perhaps it may be 
called — which is implied in a feeling of 
reverence is apt to subside or grow lax 



52 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

through the effort required to maintain it. 
Before one is aware of it in reading the 
Bible the spirit may sink back from the 
height to which it had been lifted by the 
thought of God, and page after page of 
the divine book may be listlessly passed 
over without the inspiration of that 
thought. 

This sense of the sacredness of the 
Bible, must, I repeat, be carefully fostered 
by the Christian. Just because it is one 
of those forms of spiritual sensibility, one 
of those delicate habits, which prove the 
perfectness of the organism in which they 
reside, it is easily impaired, or even lost. 
As the ear which is not quick to discern 
the distinction of sounds would never 
convey to the heart the peculiar force 
which lies in a tone of friendship or love, 
so the Bible, when it is not felt by the 
soul to be the voice of God, cannot affect 
the soul with the force which properly be- 
longs to a communication from him. 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 53 



IVo 

The Bible is to be studied in a spirit of 
docility and submissiveness. 

It speaks with authority. The teachings 
of Jesus impressed the people with the 
conviction that he spake in this way, and 
their minds, in listening to him, spon- 
taneously assented to the truth of his 
doctrines and the justness of his precepts. 
The disposition to criticise and to contro- 
vert, in which, perhaps, we may lawfully 
indulge when reading an ordinary book, 
we should habitually repress in dealing 
with the Bible. Clearly, the Christian, 
whatever he may once have done, does not, 
after surrendering his faith to God, claim 
the right to make his own opinion the 
arbiter in matters of truth and righteous- 
ness. He has become the little child, and 
confessing his own ignorance and foolish- 
ness, and rejoicing to recognize in God a 
Father who cannot err and will not deceive, 
he looks up to him as the ultimate arbiter in 
all such matters. Confidence in the infalli- 
ble source of his knowledge precludes all 
questioning and argument, because all 



54 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



questions are solved and all arguments are 
comprehended in the one conviction that 
the Bible is the word of God. 

There is nothing unreasonable in such 
confidence. It is in just such confidence 
that the scholar takes as true what his 
teacher tells him is true, and the child does 
or refrains from doing the things which his 
parents command or forbid. It is only re- 
ceiving as truth what comes through the 
testimony of One who knows, and accept- 
ing as duty what is enjoined by One who 
has the right to command us and who ex- 
ercises his right for our interest. The all- 
sufficient reason, in both cases, is found in 
the character of him whom we trust and 
obey. I am assuming, of course, that the 
Christian, upon grounds which he deems 
reasonable, has accepted the Bible as a 
revelation from God, and that by the use 
of his reasonable faculties he has ascer- 
tained what is the testimony of the Bible 
on any given point of truth or duty. 
Then, I say, the act of receiving this testi- 
mony without further questioning or argu- 
ment is entirely reasonable. Speculation 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 55 



and debate should end when God speaks. 
This state of mind, this docility and sub- 
missiveness of temper, of which I am 
speaking, is a condition essential to the 
profitable studying of the Scriptures. For 
the mind must be trustingly and lovingly 
placed in the hands of a teacher in order 
to be taught. Doubt and suspicion enter- 
tained in regard to the source from which 
information is sought will impair the com- 
pleteness of the result, if they do not 
defeat it altogether. They will be like 
obstructions in the mouth of the vessel 
we are attempting to fill, or like pebbles 
in the mass of clay we are trying to mould 
into symmetrical form. 

It may be added to this that the enjoy- 
ment which the mind feels in reposing with 
an assurance upon the trustworthiness of 
a teacher is necessary to a full impression 
of anything communicated to it. We fre- 
quently use the phrase "resting upon 
testimony," and use it in two senses — first, 
that of confiding in it as a genuine ground 
of belief; and second, that of deriving 
from it a sense of comfort and repose. 



56 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

Where there is no " resting " in the latter of 
these senses, there is probably none in the 
former of them. Certainly, no adequate im- 
pression of the thing testified can be made 
upon the mind. It is the boast of the Roman- 
ist that in accepting the dogma of the infal- 
libility of the Church he is relieved of all 
uneasiness or risks in his belief. To be safe 
he has simply to believe what the Church 
tells him to believe. If he can accept 
this dogma, he undoubtedly does experience 
this relief. Now, the temper in which the 
Romanist rests upon the testimony of the 
Church is that in which the Christian 
should rest upon the testimony of the 
Bible. It is resting which brings with it a 
sense of comfort and repose, and it does 
this because it is the resting of a true faith. 
In the possession of this temper the stu- 
dent will approach the Bible with that 
cordial reliance upon its truthfulness and 
competency, and with that freedom from 
all forms of strife with its teachings, which 
will prepare him like an empty vessel to 
be filled, or like the plastic clay to be 
moulded into figure. 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. $? 

The disposition I am recommending is 
not inconsistent with a sense of surprise in 
the mind of the reader at particular things 
with which he meets in the Bible. He may- 
be rationally forced to admit to himself 
every now and then, " This is a strange 
incident," or " This is a hard saying ;" but 
the obstacles of faith which a minute and 
shortsighted criticism might find in such 
enigmatical passages will disappear in a 
moment before the evidence for the cred- 
ibility of the book which blazes like sun- 
light in the general facts of its history, its 
attributes, its contents, its aptitudes, its 
correspondences with the facts of life and 
nature, its varied uses as a factor in society, 
and its beneficent effects upon human 
character and destiny. To conclude, from 
the occasional features in it which we do 
not understand, that all this body of evi- 
dence is worthless would be as unreason- 
able as to affirm that a watch was no safe 
and useful index of time because there 
were parts of its structure which the 
observer could not see to be consistent 
with its plan or conducive to its result. 



53 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



V. 

The Bible should be read with a convic- 
tion that in it there is lodged a power to 
confer upon the faithful student certain and 
manifold benefits. 

This is simply to use it as a means of 
grace or as one of the instrumentalities 
through which God is accustomed to bestow 
spiritual benefits. The passages which 
ascribe a capacity and a potency of this 
kind to the Scriptures are almost innumer- 
able. David, in the nineteenth psalm, from 
verse 7 to verse 10, represents them as 
charged with an energy as diversified and 
as efficacious as that of the sun. They 
convert the soul, make wise the simple, 
rejoice the heart and enlighten the eyes. 
In Jer. xxiii. 29 the word of the Lord is 
likened to a fire and to a hammer that 
break the rock in pieces. Our Lord says 
(John vi. 63), "The words that I speak 
unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." 
St. Paul reminds Timothy (2 Tim. iii. 15) 
that the Holy Scriptures are able to 
make him " wise unto salvation ;" and in 
addressing the Ephesian elders (Acts xx. 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 59 

22) he commends them "to God and the 
word of his grace/' which is able to build 
them up and to give them an inheritance 
among all them that are sanctified. Jesus, 
in his intercession for his disciples (John 
xvii. 17), prays, "Sanctify them through thy 
truth: thy word is truth/' Such expres- 
sions must be stripped of their natural 
significance if we do not understand them 
to teach that in the Bible there is a property 
which is peculiar to it, and which makes it 
capable of communicating gracious influ- 
ences to the reader using it aright, such 
as are not to be expected from any other 
book. 

This property, I need hardly say, is not 
magical, such as an ignorant devotee sup- 
poses to belong to a consecrated candle 
or to the water of the Ganges. The mere 
use of the letter of the Bible or the mere 
mechanical reading of it will not secure 
the exercise of it. It is simply the result 
of God's blessing upon the honest and the 
earnest effort of the soul to know his will 
and to enjoy communion with him. The 
effect of a conviction of the reality of it is, 



6o 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



riot to produce superstition, but to encour- 
age and enliven faith and to induce in the 
mind of the student, as often as he takes up 
the sacred record, the same feeling of pleas- 
ant expectancy which one carries with him 
when he strikes the cords of an instrument 
for the purpose of obtaining musical sounds, 
or when he opens the shutter of a dark 
room for the purpose of admitting light. 
There is implied in such a feeling a motive 
which looks beyond mere entertainment, 
or even the acquisition of knowledge, and 
seeks and expects from the reading of the 
Scriptures a spiritual refreshment and 
invigoration analogous to that helpful in- 
spiration of the body which is sought 
and expected from the inhaling of the 
sea-breeze or the mountain-air. Like the 
blessing of the new wine which the prophet 
says (Isa. Ixv.) 8 is found in a cluster of 
grapes, so it may be said to the believer, as 
often as he handles God's word, " Touch it 
thankfully, touch it hopefully ; for there is 
a blessing in it." 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 6 1 



VI. 

With this conviction, the Christian should 
study the Bible with a solemn impression 
that he is dealing with that which the Holy 
Spirit uses as the means of his supernatural 
working. 

That the soul of the Christian is the 
subject of this supernatural working from 
the beginning to the completion of its 
spiritual history is so clearly taught in the 
Scriptures that I need not pause to show 
the proof of the doctrine. The point with 
which I am concerned is the further doc- 
trine of Scripture that it is in connection 
with the truths of revelation that this work- 
ing is ordinarily (at least) carried on. This 
procedure is due to two facts — first, that 
the Holy Spirit operates upon the soul in 
accordance with, and not in violation of, 
the laws of its nature ; and second, that it 
is one of these laws that the soul, in order 
to be in a right state, should be in agree- 
ment with the truth. To bring it into a 
right state, therefore — which is what the 
Holy Spirit undertakes to do — it must be 
made to see, to accept and to feel the truth. 



62 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



When, for instance, the Holy Spirit would 
lead the soul out of a state of sinfulness 
into one of holiness, he must convince it 
that its former state is at variance with the 
truth, and that its latter state is in harmony 
with the truth; he must show it that the 
one is a false way and the other a right 
way. It is through a perception of the 
truth and an acknowledgment of the truth 
that the change is to be effected. "Thy 
word is truth," says the Saviour ; and the 
word of God is the Bible. In entire con- 
sistency, therefore, with the nature of the 
soul, the Holy Spirit works with and through 
the contents of the Bible. In the use of 
the Bible men must seek for and expect 
his supernatural aid. Those right percep- 
tions, right affections, right principles and 
right purposes which the Holy Spirit would 
implant in the heart he will introduce there 
by applying to the heart the truths of the 
Bible. And the Bible is to be read, there- 
fore, with a constant and serious recognition 
of the power of the Holy Spirit as present 
in it and as concurrent with the exercise 
of reading it. Such a recognition was 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING, 63 

certainly in the Psalmist's mind when he 
prayed (Ps. cxix. 18), "Open thou mine 
eyes that I may behold wondrous things 
out of thy law ;" and it was no less clearly 
in the apostle's mind when he told the 
Corinthians (i Cor. ii. 14) that "the 
things of the Spirit of God are to be 
spiritually discerned," or apprehended by 
a discernment communicated by the Spirit ; 
and that their faith stood not in the wis- 
dom of man, but in the power of God, be- 
cause it was in the " demonstration of the 
Spirit " that the gospel had been preached 
to them and received by them. 

This connection of the Holy Spirit's in- 
fluence with the use of the Bible suggests 
not only the habit of looking for his aid, 
but the duty of asking for it. The offices 
of the Holy Spirit are specially to be 
sought for by prayer (Luke xi. 13) ; hence 
the reading of the Bible should be accom- 
panied with prayer for divine light The 
success of the exercise, any one can see, 
largely depends upon the temper of mind 
with which the Scriptures are at any time 
studied and upon the manner in which the 



6 4 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



truths it presents strike the mind. Here, 
in determining this temper and this man- 
ner, is a place for the interposition of the 
Holy Spirit. A simple and earnest plead- 
ing for the benefit of this interposition will 
show both that the student is eagerly seek- 
ing the knowledge of God's word and that 
he is relying in his search, not upon the 
" wisdom of man" merely, but upon the 
" power of God." Forgetfulness of this 
latter duty or a presumptuous confidence 
in his own intellectual sufficiency may lead 
a man into the grave offence of " quench- 
ing the Spirit " even when professedly en- 
gaged in the study of the things of the 
Spirit 

VIL 

The study of the Bible implies that the 
reading of it is followed by meditation. 

It is the thinking of a thing which fastens 
it in the mind and causes it to take effect 
upon the mind. " While I was musing," 
says the Psalmist (Ps. xxxix. 3), 44 the fire 
burned." All that has been heretofore 
said of the nature and capacities of the 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 65 

Bible is enough to show that there are 
results to be reached through the study 
of it which are real, and that they are 
worth an earnest effort to attain them. 
They are likened to hid treasure and de- 
serve to be sought for by patient effort. 
Meditation is the precise effort of the 
mind, not only to uncover the contents 
of the Bible and to satisfy the intelligence 
as to whether they are there and as to 
what their import is, but to make them 
actually the possession of the student. It 
is the process by which we give life and 
force to the things which the Scripture 
reveals. It is not simply acquisitive, aim- 
ing to gain a knowledge of what is written, 
nor simply inquisitive, aiming to find out 
the exact value of words and meaning 
of propositions. It may include these or 
presuppose them, but it goes beyond them. 
It is the feeding upon food already provid- 
ed and prepared rather than the providing 
and preparing of it. It is a sort of rumi- 
nation upon what is already accepted by 
the mind as true and understood. 

This is a complex process involving acts 



66 FOLLOWING CHRIST, 

of perception, memory, attention and re- 
flective application. It requires a frank, 
docile, truthful and devout frame of mind. 
The object and the result of it are to 
transfer the sentiment of the Bible to the 
heart of the reader, so that the force of 
whatever kind which belongs to it shall 
be felt and responded to by the heart. 
Hence, as a rule for Christians, it may be 
stated 'that it is better to read a short 
portion of the Bible with due meditation 
than much in an unintelligent and cursory 
way. Some good men have adopted the 
plan of selecting at the beginning of each 
year a single verse as a motto to be kept 
before their minds during the year, and 
have found it a spring of living water 
affording fresh thoughts and healthful in- 
spirations each day. 

Difficulties, I am aware, in the way ot 
connecting meditation with the reading of 
the Scriptures arise, sometimes from a lack 
of aptitude for such an exercise, of which 
a person is conscious, and more frequently 
from the sense of irksomeness which at- 
tends it. Mental work of any kind, to 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 67 

one not trained to it, is confessedly embar- 
rassing and distasteful. Hence, many who 
read their Bibles never ponder in their 
hearts the things they have read. They 
are like the man of whom St. James speaks 
(i. 23) who beholds his natural face in a 
glass, and then goes his way and " straight- 
way forgetteth what manner of man he 
was." An honest Christian, however, will 
feel, in the case of the word of God, that 
no trouble in the effort to understand it 
can be an excuse for declining the effort. 

For the encouragement of the weak 
disciple it may be mentioned that the 
mind is very easily put under the con- 
trol of regulated habit, and that the very 
revelation of great and inspiring truths to 
the soul often seems to quicken the intel- 
lect and to endow even an uncultured 
mind with aptitudes and energies of which 
it was never before conscious. Even babes, 
under the illumination of the Holy Spirit, 
may acquire the faculty of understanding 
things which are hid from the naturally 
wise and prudent. 

The greatest obstacle which will beset 



68 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

the duty I am recommending will probably 
be found, in the insatiable demands of 
worldly business. The Christian will be 
in danger of concluding that he has no 
time for meditating upon what he reads 
in the word of God, and therefore is under 
no obligation to concern himself with the 
attempt. This danger needs to be rec- 
ognized and to be guarded against. 

Let it be noticed that meditation is not 
literal reading and does not require the pres- 
ence of a book, and that it is not technical 
study and does not require the seclusion of a 
closet nor the facilities of a library. It is 
simply the working of the mind, and may 
be performed, to some extent, wherever 
the mind is. What should prevent the 
performing of it, ' therefore, even in the 
place of business ? Why should not some 
text lodged in the mind in the morning be 
summoned from the memory, looked at 
and thought over a hundred times in the 
day? Why should it not be at hand, like 
the watch in one's pocket, to be consulted 
from hour to hour? Even the hard sea- 
beach over which the incoming wave rolls 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING. 69 



back again, withdrawing its volume as rap- 
idly as it poured it in, will show here and 
there a cavity in which will sparkle a little 
pool of crystal water left by the receding 
tide. Surely the busiest soul, washed over 
merely, as it may seem to have been, by 
the truths of God's word which it has hur- 
riedly surveyed, may here and there find 
a receptacle in which some portion of the 
sacred element may be retained, upon 
which the spirit may slake its thirst even 
amidst the bustle of the street or the 
crowding cares of the workshop or the 
office. At all events, the rest of the Sab- 
bath will give to every Christian an oppor- 
tunity for meditating upon the Scriptures, 
and the proper improvement of this op- 
portunity will in all probability create a 
habit which will extend such meditation 
into the weekday life. 

VIII. 

A few suggestions as to the method of 
studying the Bible may be added to this 
exposition of the nature of the process. 

First. The Bible is to be read regularly 



70 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

as a whole. The most obvious way for 
accomplishing this would appear to be to 
begin at the beginning and read it con- 
tinuously through to the end. This way 
is very commonly pursued by religious 
people, and . many can report that within 
a lifetime they have read the book through 
an almost incredible number of times. 
Such a way, however, seems to lose sight 
of the principle that the Bible is to be read, 
not for the sake of the reading of it, but 
for the sake of the uses which the reading 
of it may serve. To get a use from the 
reading of it, it will be found advantageous 
to divide it into sections and read success- 
ively a portion from each. A convenient 
division will be into: (i) The historical 
writings of the Old Testament, from Gen- 
esis to Job ; (2) The poetical writings of 
the same, including the prophets ; (3) The 
evangelical writings, composed of the four 
Gospels and the Acts ; (4) The didactic 
writings, consisting of the Epistles and 
Revelation. Each reader, however, can 
make the division according to his own 
view of expediency. The object of this 



THE RULE OF RELIGIOUS LIVING, 7 l 

recommendation is to secure such a variety 
in the instruction obtained from the Bible 
as may suit the varying wants of the soul. 
These wants can hardly be provided for 
from day to day by the contents of any 
single one of the inspired books. Would 
it not be better for the readers mind, for 
instance, after having been studying the 
structure of the tabernacle in Exodus, to 
turn to the confessions of the fifty-first 
psalm or to the touching parables of Luke 
xv. ? 

Secondly. It will be an advantage to the 
reader to inform himself of the authorship 
of the book he is reading and of the circum- 
stances of the age and country to which it 
relates. Such letters as those written by 
St. Paul to the Corinthians can be much 
better understood when the mind carries 
along with the reading of them a clear 
conception of the social condition of the 
people to whom they were addressed. 
Such information can easily be obtained 
from the expository works which are now 
so numerous. 

Thirdly. The Bible is the best interpreter of 



72 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



itself. It is an exceedingly useful practice 
to compare, by the aid of " marginal refer- 
ences," one passage with another. Such 
comparisons help not only to solve par- 
ticular difficulties, but to bring out in an 
interesting way the unity of Scripture. If 
the truth at one point seems to be locked 
up in obscurity, the key to it may be found 
at another point, showing that the same 
Spirit is the author of both. 

Fourthly. The language of the Bible in 
important texts should be committed to mem- 
ory. Language is the channel through 
which thoueht and emotion flow, and a 
good channel facilitates the flow of thought 
and emotion. Scripture phrases coming 
readily to the mind are thus aids to de- 
votion. They furnish the wheels upon 
which the soul moves most comfortably 
and safely in prayer. 

Fifthly. It is well frequently to arrest the 
mind at certain points and compel it to reflect 
that it is dealing not merely with a book, but 
with facts ; not merely with poetic conceits 
or abstract propositions, but with living 
truths. Let the thought often challenge 



THE RULE OE RELIGIOUS LIVING. 73 

the attention of the reader: " The Jehovah 
who spake to Moses is the God who still 
speaks to me;" "The Jesus who conversed 
with Nicodemus is still uttering the same 
doctrine to me." Such a habit will serve 
to bring home the teachings of the Bible 
to the reader personally. 

Sixthly. It is an adventitious, but not an 
improper, aid in studying the Bible to invest 
particular parts and passages of it with 
associations which are precious to the reader. 
By this process human history becomes in- 
terwoven with the word of God, and the 
sacred volume becomes dearer to us be- 
cause enshrined in sacred recollections and 
experiences : " This book or this chapter 
brings back the image of a sainted parent 
whose tongue was wont to recite it with 
rapturous tones in my youthful ears ;" "This 
verse contains the sunbeam which led a 
distinguished reformer or evangelist out 
of darkness into light;" "This fragment 
of a psalm became a song of triumph on 
a martyr's lips " This gracious promise 
brought the balm of consolation to my 
heart long years ago when crushed with 



74 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

the weight of some great sorrow ;" " This 
petition is perfumed with the memory of 
some pious friend whose panting after God 
it expressed;" "This vision of the heaven- 
ly city revealed its opened gates and shin- 
ing streets to the eye of some sufferer 
amidst the agonies of a dying-bed." It is 
wonderful how many things in the life of 
an individual may thus link themselves to 
the holy book, and may throw around it 
the drapery of sweet and tender thoughts 
and feelings. Thus it may be made what 
no other book can be— a personal friend, 
a sharer in our private joys and sorrows, 
a kinsman dividing with us the secret life 
of the soul. Such associations, like a 
chime of holy earth-born melodies blend- 
ing with the voice of God, deserve to be 
cherished, as they both add to- the attract- 
iveness and enhance the efficiency of the 
Bible. 



CHAPTER IV. 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 

HRIST was so conspicuously a wor- 



shiper of God and an attendant upon 
public worship that no one can be a fol- 
lower of him without imitating him in this 
respect. Besides his example, he has given 
his disciples a form of prayer, and a form 
which seems to imply that they will wor- 
ship in companies. Indeed, it may be 
asked how any one can believe that the 
Lord is " great and greatly to be praised," 
as every believer in Christ must, without 
being moved in some outspoken way to 
magnify and praise him. 

The mere act and the mere word of 
worship are, we know, of no value in his 
sight. Without the spirit and the under- 
standing, our oblations are vain and our 
incense is an abomination unto him (Isa. i. 




75 



76 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

13). But the fact that the offering of 
formal worship without the participation 
of the soul is an offence to God does not 
prove that formal worship in which the 
soul does participate is not acceptable to 
God and may be required by him. 

The proper definition of the word " wor- 
ship" is "the acknowledgment by one party 
of the worth of another." The worship of 
the Almighty is the acknowledgment by 
man of God's infinite worth. Worth is 
entitled to recognition wherever it is found. 
Not to recognize it is evidence, in any party, 
of moral blindness or obliquity, and is an 
exhibition of injustice which is positively 
criminal. The duty of worshiping God is 
only the active phase of the duty of be- 
lieving in God. 

Hear how the Scriptures speak of him: 
"O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy 
name in all the earth " (Ps. viii. 11); "Worthy 
is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power 
and riches and wisdom and strength and 
honor and glory and blessing," is said of 
our Lord Jesus Christ (Rev. v. 12). 

Excellence and worth so transcendant 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 77 

are entitled to receive proper acknowledg- 
ment at the hands of men. How can a 
man be a religious man without acknowl- 
edging them? The only question that 
can possibly be entertained is, " How are 
such excellence and such worth to be ac- 
knowledged ?" 

The answer to this question is, first, by 
an intelligent apprehension of them and 
a complacent appreciation of them by the 
soul The organ of acknowledgment must 
undoubtedly be an enlightened and approv- 
ing soul. But the utterance in some formal 
way of what the soul believes and feels is 
always a natural exercise, and is — ordina- 
rily, at least — a condition necessary to dis- 
tinctness of belief and vividness of feeling. 
Hence, to this first answer a second is to 
be joined : God's excellence and worth are 
to be acknowledged in every formal way 
in which the soul can express its belief in 
and its feeling toward them. The act, the 
word, the sensible demonstration, consti- 
tuted as man now is, are co-ordinate factors 
with the thought and the emotion, and help, 
with the latter, to call out and to call forth 



7 8 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

the life of the soul. Man is not yet capable 
of living as a pure spirit, and needs the aid 
of formal expression to keep up his sense 
of God's excellence and worth. So long 
as the expression serves this purpose- 
really serves it, and serves no other pur- 
pose—it is a valuable help, not to say a 
necessary one, to spiritual life. Public 
worship is such an expression, or, rather, a 
combination of such expressions. Proper- 
ly conducted, it is a celebration of God's 
excellence and worth. It is enjoined, not 
because God needs the praise of man, but 
because it is due from man, becoming in 
man and profitable to man. 

So far as appears from Scripture, God 
has always been worshiped by formal rites. 
These rites are the monuments by which 
he asserts his claim to faith and reverence 
and honor in the eyes of an apostate world. 
They are the testimony in behalf of relig- 
ion which he causes to be proclaimed in the 
ears of the unbelieving generations of men. 
For a Christian to disown his obligation to 
attend upon the public worship of God is 
to discredit these monuments and to con- 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 79 

tradict this testimony. To say that he does 
not need the influence of it himself is to 
betray an ignorance of the wants of his 
own soul ; to say that the world does not 
need it is to exhibit an indifference to the 
wants of his race. Such incongruities will 
be shunned by every honest follower of 
Christ. As the Son of God, during his 
human life, kept the holy days and fre- 
quented the synagogue and the temple 
as a faithful Israelite, no man claiming to 
be his disciple can conscientiously fail to 
keep the Christian Sabbath and frequent 
the place where God is worshiped accord- 
ing to the law of the New Testament. 

I. 

The observance of public worship ought 
to be classed by the young Christian among 
those moral duties which he has engaged 
to perform. It rests upon an ordinance 
of God as distinctly as do the commands 
which require him to be honest and charita- 
ble in his dealings with his neighbor. It is 
a part of the peculiar work which is given 
him as a professor of religion to do. It is 



8o 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



not something left to the taste or the fancy 
or the convenience of the individual; it is 
what the Lord expects from every one of 
his servants. He evidently requires his 
worship to be maintained in the world : 
"Ye shall keep my Sabbaths, and rever- 
ence my sanctuary: I am the Lord" (Lev. 
xxvi. 2). 

Now, by whom is this to be done ? " By 
the church," it may be answered ; yet what 
is the church but the aggregate of the liv- 
ing men and women in any generation or 
community? Let these living men and 
women neglect the worship of God, and 
where is the church which will keep it up? 
The church is realized in each one of these 
men and women, and the obligations of the 
church rest upon each one of them. The 
divine ordinance which calls for a worship- 
ing church is simply a call to each church- 
member to be a worshiper. Let the 
church-member remember this, and from 
the moment of his entering the church 
let him place this duty foremost among 
those forms of business to which his life 
is to be devoted. 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 8 1 



I use the term "business" in this con- 
nection because I have observed that what 
is technically called " business " is the most 
frequent obstacle in the way of the perform- 
ance of this duty of public worship. The 
excuse which in his own view most effect- 
ually justifies a man in neglecting this duty 
is that his "business" forbids it He would 
be ashamed to say that his pleasure or his 
indolence forbade it, but "business" has 
something respectable— almost sacred— in 
it ; for is not he who provides not for his 
own said to be worse than an infidel? (i 
Tim. v. 8.) 

The mistake here is in making a distinc- 
tion between business and the worship of 
God. The Christian's business compre- 
hends the doing of all his heavenly Father s 
will, and it is as much his heavenly Father's 
will that his worship should be observed by 
his people as that their families should be 
supported by diligence in their secular call- 
ings. If any distinction is to be made be- 
tween the two, the former should take pre- 
cedence of the latter ; the business which 
concerns God should claim attention before 



82 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

that which concerns man. The Saviour 

directed an unsparing rebuke at this dis- 
position to place devotion to worldly busi- 
ness over religious duty when he said to 
the rich young man (Matt. xix. 21), "Go 
sell that thou hast, and come and follow 
me." Worldly business must retire when 
religious business presents its claims. The 
man too busy at his counter or in his office 
or his workshop to attend upon the worship 
of God is in the most notorious sense a 
neglecter of his business as a Christian. 

The same is true of the man who ex- 
cuses himself from attendance upon Sab- 
bath worship on the ground that on the 
Sabbath his overtaxed mind and his weary 
body are unfit to participate in its services. 
Has' he a right so to disqualify himself tor 
God's business, by overtaxing his mind 
and by wearying his body in the prosecu- 
tion of his own calling? There is a use 
of "the mammon of unrighteousness/' the 
Saviour teaches (Luke xvi. 9). which can 
make " friends " to the believer or helpers 
in securing admittance for him to "ever- 
lasting habitations," but surely it cannot 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 83 



be such a use as robs God of the service 
due to him. Oh, let the follower of Christ 
be warned of this device of Satan, and let 
him see to it that in his devotion to his 
worldly business he does not become a 
defaulter to his Master. His success in 
his religious life will largely depend upon 
his fidelity in this particular. 

The ordinary occupations of life create 
a perpetual drain upon spiritual strength. 
Worship — public worship — is needed to re- 
pair the waste. Not only the Sabbath ser- 
vices, but the lecture and the prayer-meet- 
ing of the week, are needed for this pur- 
pose. These religious episodes are tonics 
to the soul. They meet the Christian in 
the midst of his working-days with solaces 
as timely and as refreshing as those which 
the Israelites found in the wells and the 
palm trees of Elim : u They that wait upon 
the Lord shall renew their strength " (Isa. 
xl. 21). The habit of attending upon pub- 
lic worship, once formed, will cause the 
difficulties which obstruct it to vanish, and 
will make an abundant compensation for 
all the effort it costs, both in the relief it 



8 4 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



will give to the sense of duty and in the 
supply it will furnish to the needs of the 
soul. 

II. 

The worshiping of God is so serious a 
business that it calls for forethought and 
preparation. 

The disposition to engage in it as a 
mere matter of routine or custom, without 
a conscious impression of its meaning, may 
easily arise from the fact that the mind is 
so often called to the performance of the 
duty. Week after week, Sabbath after 
Sabbath, throughout the year, at a regular 
hour, the worshiper is summoned to the 
house of God. That each occasion should 
present itself with a fresh interest and 
should stir the heart with a felt attractive- 
ness, it is necessary that the attention should 
be directed to the work in hand and that the 
soul should be strung, by a process of re- 
flection, with well-tuned chords. Levity of 
mind is, of course, at open variance with 
the idea of worship; vacancy of mind is 
hardly less so. With good reason, there- 
fore, the counsel was given by them of old 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 85 

time : " Be not rash with thy mouth, and let 
not thine heart be hasty to utter anything 
before God " (Eccl. v. 21). What is said 
and what is done in worship ought to be 
said and done with deliberation, in a re- 
ligious spirit and with a religious intent. 
As no man rationally enters upon a grave 
enterprise without contemplating the nature 
of it and the mental conditions it requires 
in the party engaging in it, so the Christian 
should seriously strive to put himself in 
frame for such an act as the worship of 
God. He should never precipitate him- 
self into it in a rash or hasty manner. 

Very obviously, in this endeavor after 
self-preparation, he should by prayer in- 
voke those gracious inspirations which 
come from Him with whom are "the prep- 
aration of the heart, and the answer of 
the tongue" (Prov. xvi. 1). No truly de- 
vout man will fail to take account of his 
own infirmities when he proposes to ap- 
proach God in worship. The promised 
aids of the Holy Spirit will never seem 
more seasonable than then, and they will 
be definitely sought by prayer. 



86 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

In this connection it may not be amiss 
to say that in churches where liturgies 
are not used in public worship there is a 
special call for effort and culture on the 
part of the individual engaging in the 
work. While it is the task of the minister 
to direct the current of devotion, it is the 
task of the hearer, in order to be a wor- 
shiper, to throw his mind into that current. 
This requires closeness of attention and 
control of thought. The invitation, "Let 
us pray," should be responded to by each 
worshiper with the determination to make 
the prayer about to be uttered his own. 
In the reading of the Scriptures it is un- 
doubtedly an aid to the object in view for 
the hearer to have his own Bible at hand 
and to follow the officiating minister. 

The service of psalmody is emphatically 
the service of the people. It is the duty 
of every church-member as far as possible 
to take part in it. The objection of inabil- 
ity, so often raised, only lays the ground 
for another remark— viz., that it is the duty 
of every church-member to make it a study 
to be able to take part in it. It belongs to 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 87 



his business as a Christian man to educate 
himself for this work, and, if he be a parent, 
to educate his children for it. It is a per- 
version of this divine ordinance when the 
congregation delegates the execution of it 
to a choir, and, instead of singing praise 
to God, expect to be sung to themselves. 
Rightly considered, there is as much rea- 
son for the petition, " Lord, teach us to 
sing," as there is for the petition, " Lord, 
teach us to pray;" for singing is essentially 
the same act as praying. There is room 
for the question whether the absence of 
spiritual power which is so frequently de- 
plored in our churches is not due to the 
failure of Christian people to do their duty 
in this branch of worship. Certainly, a 
company of professed worshipers indo- 
lently sitting in their pews to be enter- 
tained by a musical performance are more 
likely to repel than to invite the offices of 
the divine Inspirer. 

III. 

The spirit of worship should be as dis- 
tinctly carried into the hearing of the word 



88 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



preached as into the purely devotional 
parts of the service, 

It is a mistake, and a hurtful one, to sup- 
pose that in listening to the sermon we 
have ceased to maintain communion with 
God. It is he who has then become the 
party speaking, and it may be that in the 
utterances then and there addressed to us 
he may make a response to the very aspi- 
rations which have ascended to him in our 
praises and prayers. 

The distinction which is sometimes made 
between the formally devotional service 
and the sermon in public worship, and the 
tone of depreciation with which the latter 
is, in certain quarters, spoken of, are the 
offspring of ignorance. The teaching ot 
the law of the Lord seems always to have 
been closely associated with the worship 
of God, and the reason for the connection 
is founded in the nature of religion. Wor- 
ship, to be a religious act must be the ex- 
pression of right views, convictions and feel- 
ings in regard to God ; without these it is 
an empty and a worthless ceremony. These 
it is the office of preaching to supply and 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 89 

to cultivate. Instruction in the things of 
God is the natural purveyor of the material 
required for devotion, and in its work goes 
hand in hand with literal worship. And, 
conversely, it may be said that preaching 
needs the aid of worship. Without it the 
instructions of the pulpit may enrich the 
intelligence without exciting the spiritual 
affections ; with it they plant themselves in 
the soul as quickened forms of faith, and 
become real and vital forces through the 
medium of speech and emotion. The work 
of the minister, therefore, wisely compre- 
hends both functions — that of directing the 
devotions of the people, and that of preach- 
ing to them the word of God. 

The hearing of the word preached is to 
be attended to with substantially the same 
frame of mind as that with which direct 
worship is to be performed. The object 
of the preacher, if he understands his call- 
ing, is to report and to give effect to the 
truth which God has revealed ; the duty of 
the hearer is to get, through the preacher, 
a better knowledge and a clearer impres- 
sion of this truth. The thing which the 



go 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



preacher has to do is to deliver a message 
from God ; the business of the hearer is 
to look for it, appropriate it and carry it 
away with him. In order to this, the coun- 
sels given in a previous chapter in regard 
to the study of the Bible may profitably be 
followed. 

In addition, I would offer the following 
suggestions : 

First. The worshiper should examine 
himself before going to the house of God 
as to his motive and purpose, and should 
endeavor to make it his definite errand to 
honor God and to obtain religious instruc- 
tion. This process is an easy one, within 
the power of everybody, and is necessary 
in order to make "going to church" a 
rational act. 

Second. The ear and the heart should 
be prepared by prayer for the parts they 
are to take in the service. 

Third. Peculiarities in the preacher, fa- 
vorable or unfavorable, should not be suf- 
fered to divert the mind from the appre- 
ciation of the truth presented. A genuine 
appetite will relish food even when con- 



OBSERVANCE OF PUBLIC WORSHIP. 9 1 

veyed in a homely vessel, and will never 
miss the food through admiration of an 
attractive vessel. 

Fourth. After the hearing of the sermon 
the mind should be questioned as to the 
profit gained by a review of its contents 
and by meditation upon them. 

Fifth. The impression of the word preach- 
ed should be fixed and deepened by con- 
versation upon it with other serious per- 
sons. 

Sixth. Prayer for the quickening influ- 
ences of the Holy Spirit should be offered 
up, that the seed sown may take root in 
the hearer's heart and bring forth appro- 
priate fruit. 

By efforts like these the preaching of 
the word may be expected to become what 
it was designed to be — a means of edifica- 
tion, a source of sanctifying grace and an 
invaluable help to the Christian seeking 
to understand the will and to acquire the 
mind of his. Master. The faithful hearing 
of God's word is enough like prayer to 
be entitled to a share in all the promises 
made to prayer, and the man who goes to 



92 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



it, as he goes to his knees, asking from 
God the bread of life, may be sure he will 
never be sent away empty. 

" What man is there of you, whom if his 
son ask bread, will he give him a stone ?" 
(Matt. vii. 9.) 



CHAPTER V. 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 

THE professor of religion who does 
not pray in private is no more the 
being which that title describes than is the 
infant, who has never breathed, a living 
child. It is impossible to know God, to 
believe in him and to love him, without 
holding intercourse with him by definite 
and intelligent acts of the soul 

The arguments by which the reasonable- 
ness and the utility of prayer to God are 
demonstrated are numerous and sufficient 
to satisfy any ingenuous mind. But the 
necessity for argument is superseded here 
by the fact that man is constrained to pray 
by the moral constitution which naturally 
belongs to him. Language of entreaty or 
deprecation oftentimes instinctively bursts 
from the lips of those who have denied 
the being of a God and have been wont 

93 



94 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

to laugh at the folly of those who prayed 
to him. 

Indeed, so potent is the law by which 
men are impelled to pray that under its 
conscious pressure they are liable to be 
carried into excesses in their practice of 
the duty. Their need of prayer is felt 
at so many points that it seeks to relieve 
itself by multiplying objects to which prayer 
can be addressed. Hence, the heathen have 
invented as many divinities as there are 
departments of nature and life with which 
their well-being is connected. Not satis- 
fied with the idea of one god — the all- 
sufficient object upon which a rational faith 
is content to rest — they have amplified that 
idea until it includes as many gods as a 
superstitious fancy is pleased to invent. 

In the same way, the Romish Church, 
with that consummate sagacity which it 
has displayed in using every avenue by 
which the hearts of men may be reached 
and controlled, has taken advantage of 
this natural disposition to pray, and has 
fed and stimulated it by encouraging its 
members to address their devotions to the 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



95 



saints, to the angels and to the Virgin 
Mary. The readiness with which these 
false modes of prayer gain circulation 
proves that there is a genuine thing of 
which these are counterfeits, and that in 
man's nature there is a foundation laid for 
the use of that thing. 

The religious man will be prompted to 
pray, firs f y because of a propensity belong- 
ing to him as a man ; and second, because 
this propensity has had a new incitement 
and a new direction given to it by the new 
spiritual life which has been imparted to 
him. The very impulses of his mind and 
heart in reference to God will take on the 
form of prayer; so that there is literal 
truth in the familiar line, 

" Prayer is the Christian's vital breath." 

And as every affection residing in the 
soul is strengthened by expression and 
nourishes itself, as it were, by the terms 
it uses in giving itself utterance, so the 
religious affections need the channel of 
articulate prayer to keep themselves vig- 
orous and fresh in the believer's soul. A 



96 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

decline in spiritual life will follow a neglect 
of prayer just as certainly as a plant de- 
cays when the necessary moisture is with- 
drawn from its roots. 

Still further, the connection which the 
Scriptures establish between prayer and 
the positive blessing of God makes the 
practice of it a necessity for the Christian 
coextensive with his wants. Religious liv- 
ing is a life of entire dependence upon 
God. That he is an independent agent 
is one of the illusions under which the 
natural man lives. He is flattered and 
deceived by the thought that he is equal 
to his needs and capable of being the 
conservator and the architect of his own 
happiness. It is the characteristic of the 
spiritual man to find — and to delight to 
find— all his sufficiency in God. There 
is such a connection between his daily 
bread, for instance, and the providence 
of God that in his toiling for it he sees 
the propriety of asking God to give it; 
and when he has gained it by his toiling, 
he still feels bound to give God thanks 
for it. 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



97 



Men's needs at all times run in advance 
of their own resources or carry them be- 
yond their depth, and so prompt them to 
call for help outside of and above them- 
selves. The godless man resists this 
prompting ; the religious man gladly as- 
sents to it, and sees among the conditions 
of success in all his undertakings such a 
concurrent working of God as presents 
a definite thing to be prayed for. The 
convictions which characterize him as a 
Christian will make him a man of prayer. 
Christ was pre-eminently this, and those 
who follow him must be like him in this 
respect. It is so necessary that the young 
church-member should pray, and that his 
praying should be an exercise of the heart, 
that I would enjoin upon him the following 
counsels. 

I. 

Let it be yourself who prays. 

By this I mean let prayer be the genuine 
expression of what you feel and desire ; let 
your soul be in it. Words, when the soul 
is in them, are the outgoings of the man 
himself; where it is not in them, they are 



98 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

but sound — a mechanical result which a 
flute could produce. You and the want 
you bring to God must be one. It was 
so with the prodigal son; the shame and 
the wretchedness under which he was per- 
ishing exactly reported themselves in the 
words he addressed to his father. It was 
so with the Syrophcenician woman ; her 
daughter's suffering was a source of an 
agony to her own heart, and all the ap- 
parent repulses of the Saviour could not 
check the cry, "Lord, help me." 

In any extreme position of danger or 
distress it is easy to see that the whole 
man is in the desire for relief and will be 
equally in the prayer that asks for it. It 
is this presence of self in your prayers 
which makes them prayers. If they are 
not yours, they are not prayers at all. 
The repeating of the best form in the 
world, where it is not inspirited by your 
own soul, is not praying. Merely to « say 
your prayers" is to utter "sayings." not 
prayers. 

On this account it is well, before engag- 
ing in the act of prayer, to pause for a 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



99 



moment to interrogate the mind as to the 
objects it is about to present to God, and 
as to the sincerity of the desires it professes 
to entertain for them. 

It is well, further, to learn to express 
your prayers in words of your own. 

This need not be a difficult task. Ordi- 
narily, you do not depend upon others to 
give you the phrases in which you express 
your thoughts and your feelings. Indeed, 
such is the law of the mind that in the 
very process of defining a thought or a 
feeling to itself it has already clothed it 
in words. When the Saviour, wearied 
with his journey, sat by the well at Sychar, 
he said to the woman who came to draw 
water, "Give me to drink." Any one suf- 
fering in the same way could, and would, 
have said the same. A definite wish is 
easily put into language ; study is not 
needed and art would be out of place 
in the articulating of it. " I thirst " is the 
feeling of which consciousness takes no- 
tice in a case like that of our Lord's; "Give 
me to drink " is the form of that feeling 
expressing itself to another in prayer. The 



IOO 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



"I" of the feeling reappears in the "me" 
of the prayer. 

The subject of a feeling can best express 
that feeling. The simplicity with which it 
is expressed is no fault. The style of a 
prayer is a matter of secondary import- 
ance. For the construction of a prayer 
the soul wants no rule but the rule of 
truthfulness ; and the more plain and 
direct the form of it may be, the more it 
may correspond with this rule. No one 
man can so completely represent another, 
and so anticipate all his experiences, as to 
be able beforehand to prepare a set of 
prayers which shall cover all the circum- 
stances and meet all the needs of the latter. 
In using the prayer of another there would 
seem to be more likelihood that the self 
which must be the speaker should be 
absent than when the speaker is using 
his own words. 

Forms, however, are not to be absolute- 
ly condemned; they may often be employed 
with advantage. Especially, the Scripture 
phrases, which are so wonderfully adapted 
to the conditions of the human soul, give 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



101 



us an invaluable aid in moulding into prayer 
the desires of the heart Only let it be 
always borne in mind that another man's 
prayer can become yours simply by throw- 
ing yourself into it. The dialect of prayer 
is the dialect of nature. Above all things 
seek to be natural — -that is, simple and 
truthful — in your prayers ; and to this end 
first define your desires to your own mind, 
and then tell them to God in just the form 
in which you have defined them to your 
own mind. 

II. 

In your praying pray to God. 

When a man speaks, he must have a per- 
son before him ; for speech is the commu- 
nication of thought, and communication re- 
quires a receiver as well as a giver. Prayer 
to God implies that he is the Hearer of 
what is spoken — not merely in the sense 
in which he must hear everything as an 
omniscient being, but in the sense of a be- 
ing made consciously present and inten- 
tionally addressed by the mind of the 
speaker. It is quite possible that prayer, 
so called, should not be made to God at 



iQ2 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



all — that is, it is quite possible that men 
should professedly pray where God's pres- 
ence is not discerned by their minds, and 
where the words spoken are not directed 
to him personally. They may bend the 
knee and then occupy themselves with self- 
communings, with a sort of pious soliloquy 
or reverie, and fancy they are praying. 
They are really here thinking aloud, as it 
were — a process in which the mind is re- 
acting upon itself instead of transacting 
with God. So, in their addresses to God, 
and while using his adorable names and 
titles, they may only be addressing an ab- 
stract and imaginary object. 

It is a natural habit of the mind to per- 
sonify its own conceptions. Orators and 
poets avail themselves of it in order to 
give vividness to what they are remem- 
bering or what they are trying to realize. 
When Cowper wrote those tender lines, 

" My mother ! when I learned that thou wast dead, 
Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? 
Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son? 
Wretched e'en then, life's journey just begun?" 

he was simply indulging in affectionate 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



IO3 



reminiscences, speaking of a thing of the 
past, not speaking to a thing of the pres- 
ent When Milton, in his "Paradise Lost," 
utters the invocation, 44 Sing, heavenly 
Muse !" he was not speaking to a person, 
but attempting to rouse the energies of 
his own soul by personifying them. 

A similar illusion may be practised upon 
ourselves in praying to God. Certain 
thoughts about God may be thrown into 
the form of an address to God, but thoughts 
about God are not prayer to God. Prayer 
must put us literally in the position of one 
person speaking to another person. 

Of course this cannot be, in our case, a 
face-to-face communion with God, as it is 
said to have been in the case of Moses, but 
it is a spirit-to-spirit communion. And, as 
there is no appeal to the senses here, it is 
the mind itself which must make God a vis- 
ible person ; through the medium of faith 
it must see " Him who is invisible." Hence 
the mind must be put in a position to see 
him by deliberate forethought and by a 
constant fixing of the eye of the soul upon 
God during prayer. 



104 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



Every praying person is familiar with the 
tendency of the mind to wander in prayer, 
and every sincere worshiper deplores this 
and feels it to be sin. The explanation of 
this experience is that for the time the per- 
son has ceased to see God and to speak to 
God, and so has ceased to pray. 

Let the Christian who is in earnest guard 
against putting this similitude of prayer in 
the place of the real thing. There is no 
prayer which is not the converse of the 
soul with God — no prayer where the 
thought, the feeling, the desire, does not 
consciously reach God ; and, seeing how 
hard it is to lift the weak earthly spirit of 
man to this lwh communion, there is am- 
pie reason for a resort to that aid of the 
Holy Spirit of which the apostle speaks 
(Rom. viii. 26): " The Spirit also helpeth 
our infirmities ; for we know not what we 
should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit 
itself maketh intercession for us with groan- 
inof's which cannot be uttered." 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



105 



III. 

In praying, he careful, while you pray, to 

DO NO MORE THAN PRAY. 

To pray is to beg, to take the attitude 
of one soliciting a favor ; it is something, 
therefore, quite different from demanding 
or prescribing or enjoining. It properly 
excludes the assertion of a right on the 
part of the petitioner, for what is a man's 
by right is his by debt. It is what the 
party applied to is bound to pay. It is 
not with the tone of demand that man is to 
address God; prayer is an expression of 
man's need, not of God's duty. The ground 
upon which it is to be offered is God's will- 
ingness to regard man's need, not an obli- 
gation requiring him to relieve it. 

Now, it is not to be supposed that any 
man would deliberately command the ser- 
vices of God, and yet he may proximately 
do this in various ways ; as when he for- 
gets that God may properly say "No" to 
his petition ; or when he presumes to dic- 
tate the time and the manner in which his 
prayer is to be answered ; or when he in- 



io6 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



sists upon being gratified in his desires at 
the expense of God's will ; or when he has 
no intention to use for God's glory the 
favor asked ; or when he prays in such a 
temper as shall make him feel wronged in 
the event of God's appearing to withhold 
the blessing sought. 

It is evident that the spirit in which 
prayer is to be made is one of profound 
humility. It is that of a beggar casting his 
needs at the footstool of a benevolent, but 
at the same time a wise and righteous, sov- 
ereign. The truly Christian man will ah 
ways pray under the subduing and restrain- 
ing influence of this spirit : he will be the 
suppliant, not the exactor ; and, with what- 
ever earnestness and importunity he may 
urge his requests, he will remember that 
in regard to the disposal of the matters to 
w 7 hich they relate there are many things 
which he must leave to the good-pleasure 
of God. The Saviour's prayer in Gethsem- 
ane should teach his followers to couple 
the significant formula "If it be possible" 
with their most ardent appeals to God. 



PRIVATE PRAYER, 



XV, 

Let your prayers be accompanied with 
corresponding acts. In other words, act 
in accordance with your prayers. 

You will do this, for instance, when you 
patiently watch and wait for the results of 
your prayers. You do not pray in the 
spirit of the man who presents a check for 
which he expects instantaneously to receive 
the amount of money called for, nor in that 
of the man who drops his bucket into a well 
looking for it immediately to return filled 
with water. You have simply stated your 
wants and your troubles to God, and have 
referred the solution of them to him. To 
his judgment you have left the questions 
as to whether it is expedient that your re- 
quest should be granted at all, and whether, 
if granted, the answer should come at the 
time or in the form which you have pro- 
posed. You have avowed your confi- 
dence in him by thus appealing to God ; 
you will avow it still further by subse- 
quently maintaining an attitude of expect- 
ancy before him. 



io8 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



This latter act of confidence seems ne- 
cessary to prove the reality of the former. 
Who, seeking admittance to a house, would 
knock at the door and then go away for- 
getting what he had done ? By waiting for 
something to result from it he who truly 
knocks in prayer will show that he meant 
something by knocking. This outlooking 
frame of mind, if cultivated, would undoubt- 
edly have the double effect of deepening 
the believer's sense of his dependence on 
God and of revealing to him innumerable 
instances in which his dependence is met 
and relieved by the orderings of God's 
providence. 

Another of those acts which should con- 
cur with prayer is the diligent using of all 
practicable means for securing the blessing 
sought. No reasonable man expects mir- 
acles to be wrought in his behalf, and no 
reasonable man would claim to be cred- 
ited as sincere in asking God for a partic- 
ular benefit, when he was unwilling to make 
an effort on his own part to gain it. A 
man's working must go along with his pray- 
ing. God "giveth seed to the sower," not 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



ICQ 



to the sluggard: "The husbandman that 
laboreth must be first partaker of the 
fruits" (2 Tim. ii. 6). A Christian's life 
ought to be the repetition of his prayers, 
and no really religious man will expect a 
blessing from God, either temporal or 
spiritual, unless by corresponding acts he 
is laboring to secure the blessing. The 
result of such an accordance would prob- 
ably be that his life would be better and 
his prayers more frequently successful. 

It may be added, as a further thought in 
this connection, that the man who prays in 
a right spirit will not limit his praying to 
the mere asking of favors from God. The 
same spirit that asks a favor under the 
stress of a want or a danger will lead a 
man to express gratitude for favors already 
received, to feel and confess his sins which 
make him unworthy of what he asks, and 
to render adoring ascriptions of praise to 
those glorious attributes and offices of God 
by which he offers himself to his people as 
their Refuge in all their times of trouble. 



1 10 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



V. 

Let your prayers be offered always with 
a distinct reference to Christ as your 
medium of access to God, as the ground of 
your hope of acceptance with him, and as the 
High Priest through whose hands your peti- 
tions are presented to the Father, 

While it is true that men are naturally 
constrained to pray to God, it is equally 
true that they are naturally repelled in their 
approach to him by a sense of their ill- 
desert. The prophet's question (Mic. vi. 
6), " Wherewith shall I come before the 
Lord, and bow myself before the high God?" 
is one which every member of a sinful race 
will feel obliged to ask. This " Where- 
with" is supplied in the mediation of Christ. 
Every earnest worshiper will thankfully 
recognize the fitness of this provision of the 
gospel to his w r ants. The name of Christ 
has been left by him to his followers as a 
passport to the throne of grace. It fur- 
nishes them with both a warrant and an en- 
couragement to pray. It associates them 
with Christ in their praying, enables them 



PRIVA TE PR A J 7? R. 



to join hands, as it were, with him as their 
Elder Brother in drawing near to God, and 
so inspires them with that sense of sonship 
or filial trustfulness which Paul declares to 
be the privilege of every believer: "Ye 
have not received the spirit of bondage 
again to fear, but ye have received the 
spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, 
Father" (Rom, viii. 15). 

VI. 

Let the practical question, How is this 
practice of prayer to be kept up ? be early 
considered and answered. 

As men are ordinarily situated, this ques- 
tion will seem to present a discouraging 
enigma. To many persons— perhaps to 
the majority- — the performance of the duty 
it proposes will appear an utter impossi- 
bility. How can the man or the woman 
pursued each day, from morning to night, 
by the exactions of business or by the cares 
of the household find either time or capacity 
for such intercourse with God as I have 
been describing ? The difficulty is a real 
one, and it is well for the professor of re- 



112 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



ligion to look at it and to dispose of it at 
an early period. There is an advantage in 
promptly dealing with it. With the view 
of reducing it somewhat, the following sug- 
gestions are offered. 

First. Beware of admitting the idea that 
the difficulties which lie in the way of prac- 
ticing private prayer are an excuse for 
abandoning it. It is by u enduring hard- 
ness " — that is, by encountering and over- 
coming difficulties — that you are to show 
yourself "a good soldier of Jesus Christ" 
Difficulties lie all along the path of the 
Christian's life, and it is by his endeav- 
ors to surmount them that he will give 
the best evidence of the genuineness of 
his faith and of the earnestness of his 
purpose. 

Second. Put the necessity for prayer in 
the same class with the necessity for your 
daily food. A margin of time will always 
be found for the reception of the latter; 
cannot a similar margin be found for the 
practice of the former? A brief season 
only is required for prayer when the heart 
is in it. Let this be borrowed from the 



PRIVATE PRAYER. 



113 



morning before the day's work begins, or 
from the night before you retire to sleep. 

Third. During the day, if no opportunity 
for deliberate prayer can be found, try to 
form the habit of mentally holding com- 
munion with God. It is possible to keep 
God so constantly in the view of the soul 
that he may be consulted at any time by a 
glance, just as the mariner makes his way 
across the ocean by perpetually watching 
the compass. Especially in any critical 
juncture it is a wise custom and a helpful 
resource to make these quick appeals to 
God, and so to go into every conflict with 
temptation consciously clad in a divine pan- 
oply. Thus Nehemiah (Neh. ii. 4), when 
serving King Ahasuerus as cupbearer, be 
fore he ventured to proffer his request to be 
permitted to visit Jerusalem, secretly " pray- 
ed to the God of heaven.' 9 

It is an unspeakable comfort to the truly 
godly man that God can be addressed so 
easily, without formal adjuncts, but it needs 
to be added that the habit of so addressing 
him can hardly be kept alive without some- 
times resorting to the aid of the closet and 

8 



j 14 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

the spoken word. It is not the bended knee 
nor the devout phrase which makes the 
prayer, but still, as natural expressions of 
what the soul is doing in prayer, these are 
such helps to the spirit of prayer that with- 
out them the latter is apt to languish or to 
expire altogether. 



CHAPTER VI. 



THE CULTIVATION OF PERSONAL RELIGION. 

THERE is a work to be done by the 
Christian which is distinct from that 
which belongs to him in his capacity as a 
member of the church. It is that of culti- 
vating religion in his own soul. 

The obligation to do this work naturally 
lies upon all men. In joining the church a 
man acknowledges this obligation, and at 
the same time acknowledges his sin in hav- 
ing previously neglected it and avows his 
purpose in the future faithfully to discharge 
it. It was in part to aid men in doing this 
work that the Church was instituted, and 
church-membership, and even zeal in com- 
plying with church rules and rites, will avail 
nothing where this is overlooked. Relig- 
ious living cannot exist where there is not 
religion in the heart. The living of any 
man, no matter how it may be made to look, 

115 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



will really be what the man himself is. The 
stream which attracts the observer's eye 
must spring from a fountain concealed with- 
in the hidden rock, and in its character will 
partake of the quality of that fountain. A 
religious life will be an impossibility unless 
the springs of life within the soul are tinc- 
tured and stirred by religious principles and 
motives. 

The follower of Christ must never forget 
that in order practically to follow him he 
must be subjectively or internally like him*. 
« If any man have not the spirit of Christ, 
he is none of his " (Rom. viii. 9). The 
Spirit of Christ is an indwelling power de- 
termining the attributes and the disposition 
of the man himself. Its presence will be 
attested by a process of growth or trans- 
formation by which the man will be more 
and more shaped into the form and devel- 
oped into the stature of a perfect man in 
Christ Jesus. It would be a fatal mistake 
to imagine that one is born into the king- 
dom of God full-grown, or that admission 
to a church seals his salvation and ab- 
solves him from all further concern about 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



117 



his spiritual condition. The assuming of 
membership in the church is not the com- 
pletion, but the beginning, of a work. Or, 
rather, it is the continuing of a work which 
had been begun before in the assuming of 
a new relation to God by the believer 
through his faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. 
That prior relation must be maintained by 
care, exercise and culture after he has en- 
tered the church. All the outward badges 
which may be put upon him will not make 
him what he ought to be as a member of 
the church— that is, a child of God. It was 
as a man already religious that he took on 
him the vows involved in a public profes- 
sion of religion. As a religious man he is 
possessed of a new nature, evincing itself 
by peculiar affections toward God ; and the 
vows involved in his public profession re- 
quire him to keep this new nature in a 
healthy and an active condition. He is to 
cultivate it by attentions as direct as those 
he bestows upon a plant he wishes to rear, 
or as those by which he seeks to educate 
his child into a becoming manhood. 

The true children of God or members of 



n8 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



his Church have their type in "the tree 
planted by the rivers of water, bringing 
forth its fruit in its season" (Ps. i. 3) — 
that is, in a living and growing organism, 
and not in the dead columns standing in 
stately symmetry along the aisles of a ca- 
thedral. It is life— the " life of God in the 
soul" — which makes the Christian ; and the 
first duty of the follower of Christ is to at- 
tend to the cultivation of this life, or, what 
is the same thing, to " working out his own 
salvation with fear and trembling." 

L 

In doine this it is evidently necessary that 
he should give a prominent place to the idea 
that he is standing always in direct contact 
with God, so that all his religious move- 
ments may be said consciously to terminate 
upon him as their object 

God should be, in a supreme sense, the 
One with whom he has to do, the One with 
whom his soul is perpetually transacting. 
His standard of character, his rules of duty, 
the motives of his conduct, the quarter to 
which his responsibilities point and from 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 1 ! 9 

which conscience derives its judgments and 
its verdicts, should distinctively be found in 
God. It is only by maintaining this inti- 
mate and constant association with God that 
any man can be religious. It is just as im- 
possible to imbue the soul with the spirit of 
piety without keeping it exposed to the shin- 
ing of God's face as it is impossible to 
give color to a flower without the aid of the 
sun's ray. It is not enough to make a fel- 
low-man— not even the best Christian you 
know— your model. It is not enough to 
make the terms of a decent standing in a 
church the measure of your religiousness. 
Whatever diverts the mind from God as the 
Being whom we are striving specially to 
please, and upon whose approbation we 
depend as the ultimate source of our satis- 
faction, is adapted to stifle rather than to 
foster the religious spirit. The right-minded 
child is the one who always keeps foremost 
in his view the tribunal of his home, over 
which the parent presides, and who feels 
that he is true to his obligations only so 
long as he puts that above the opinions of 
his companions and the canons of society. 



120 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



In the same way, God's children must recog- 
nize the paramount authority of their home- 
tribunal, and must seek their peace in the 
commendation which their heavenly Father 
breathes upon them in the solitude of his 
presence-chamber. Such habitual dwelling 
with God will be religious living, and a living 
in an atmosphere where the principle of the 
religious life will be sure to grow. 

II. 

That reasonable solicitude which any one 
would feel in regard to an undertaking of 
a worldly sort in which he was interested 
ought to be exercised by the Christian in 
regard to the spiritual prosperity of his soul. 

His bodily health, we know, is an object 
of concern to every man. It requires 
thought, circumspection, prudence, over- 
sight; and with persons who act reason- 
ably it receives all these. It is anxiously 
watched over from day to day, and any de- 
viation from a sound condition is noted and 
the remedy for it sought and applied. The 
sincere Christian will inspect his religious 
condition just as carefully and closely. He 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



121 



has a character and a standing to maintain 
in reference to God, just as he has in refer- 
ence to the community among whom he 
lives ; and as he guards these with jealous 
vigilance in respect to the latter relation, 
so he will in respect to the former. He will 
"study to show himself approved unto God" 
just as he studies to preserve a good repu- 
tation in the sight of his neighbors. He 
will never suffer himself to fall into indiffer- 
ence or recklessness in regard to his relig- 
ious state, nor indolently take it for grant- 
ed that all is right within him. While he 
sleeps thus the enemy may be sowing tares 
amongst the wheat which he has pledged 
himself to produce. 

St. Paul's proposal to Barnabas (Acts xv. 
36), " Let us go again and visit our brethren 
in every city where we have preached the 
word of the Lord, and see how they do" — or 
fare, as the word means — indicates a work 
which every Christian needs to perform for 
himself. He is to go again and again and 
see how his soul is faring. Other interests 
must not be allowed to interrupt his watch- 
fulness over this superlative one. 



122 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

The sad lament of the Bride in the Song 
of Solomon (i. 6), "They made me keeper 
of the vineyards, but mine own vineyard 
have I not kept," might be made by many 
a follower of Christ who has been led to 
neglect his spiritual estate in his absorbing 
devotion to his secular concerns. The 
world is a hard master and will urge its 
claims with an unsparing rigor. Its exac- 
tions must be resisted, or the Christian's 
own " vineyard" will suffer damage. It is 
true there is a possibility of an excessive 
attention to the frames and workings of the 
soul. Some men practice this introspection 
or self-anatomy to such a degree that they 
fall into a morbid state of mind and lose the 
power of accurate discernment. The re- 
sults in such cases are hurtful because of 
the abuse of a mode of treatment which 
when properly applied is right and whole- 
some. But that some caring for, some 
watching over, some keeping of, his own 
vineyard or his own religious state, by the 
Christian is a necessary condition of his 
spiritual health and prosperity is undeni- 
able. 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 1 23 



III. 

The positive methods by which piety may be 
expected to be fostered in the heart ought to 
be diligently made use of by the professor 
of religion. 

Every faculty, every aptitude, of man is 
capable of culture and attains perfection 
through culture. "In grace" men may 
« grow," as in other things ; and growth 
means progress, development, advancement 
from stage to stage—a process which, in 
the nature of it, may be helped or retarded 
by favoring or opposing circumstances. 
The Christian will grow in grace by faith- 
fully using all legitimate means of grace. 
For instance, 

1. He will seek to enlarge his religious 
knowledge, for in any department knowl- 
edge is an aid to efficiency. To this end 
he will avail himself of the instruction offer- 
ed through the Scriptures, the pulpit and 
the lecture-room, and the various forms of 
religious literature. 

2. He will seek to keep his religious 
affections in lively exercise, and to this end 



124 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



will be much engaged in converse with God 
as he appears to the eye of faith in his glo- 
rious attributes, in his providential work 
ings, and especially in his gracious mani- 
festations through Christ and the Holy 
Spirit. He will be quick to mark the bear- 
ings of these upon his own experiences, 
and will try to hold his heart open to every 
address they make to it. Above all things 
he will prize the aid to be derived in this 
respect from secret prayer, social devotion 
and public worship. 

3. He will seek to acquire an enlightened 
and active conscience, and in order to this 
will accustom himself to test his moral per- 
ceptions and judgments by the word of God, 
and to yield them assent and obedience on 
the ground of God's authority rather than 
because they seem to be right in his own 
eyes. A man may safely follow conscience 
when he consults it with a sincere desire to 
hear God speaking in its utterances, and 
when he requires it to verify its right to 
speak by harmonizing its utterances with 
the voice of God. 

4. He will seek to preserve the purity 



PERSONAL RELIGION, 



125 



and the delicacy of his religious sensibilities, 
and in order to this will keep his affections 
fixed upon things which are really true and 
good and guard them against the seductive 
influence of those which are merely plausi- 
ble and specious. He will "try the spirits" 
before he gives his faith to them. The 
chaste soul truly espoused to Christ will feel 
that in "calling evil good" in any form, or 
in " loving or making a lie," it is guilty both 
of treachery to its Lord and of defiling it- 
self. 

5. He will seek to abound in those char- 
itable dispositions and works by which Jesus 
was so distinguished, and to this end will 
place himself in sympathy with the world 
around him and endeavor to keep his life 
mingling as a current of kindness with 
the common life of his generation. 

6. He will seek, in a word, to reproduce 
in himself, so far as this is possible, the per- 
fect mind and character of Christ, and to 
this end will by steady self-denial purge 
himself of his natural corruptions and faults, 
and with a patience and minuteness of at- 
tention like that of the sculptor will labor 



126 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



to shape himself into a likeness to his Lord. 
It is thus by its onward motion that the re- 
ligious life asserts its presence, as the clock 
serves the purpose of a clock only when its 
hands are traveling around the dial-plate. 
Therefore, says the apostle (Heb. xii. i), 
" let us lay aside every weight and the sin 
that doth so easily beset us, and let us run 
with patience the race that is set before us, 
looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher 
of our faith." 

IV. 

The counterpart of what has just been 
said is that the Christian who wishes to 
grow in religion will, as far as possible, dis- 
entangle himself from all such associations 
and surroundings as are unfavorable to 
religion. 

The Christian is the occupant of two 
spheres so intermingled that he must neces- 
sarily live in both. The one is the world, 
the other is the kingdom of God. It is his 
difficult duty to maintain the character of a 
subject of the kingdom of God while he is 
actually doing his part as a denizen of the 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



12/ 



world. It was with these contradictory ele- 
ments of their condition in his view that the 
Saviour prayed for his disciples (John xvii. 
1 5) : u I pray not that thou shouldest take 
them out of the world, but that thou should- 
est keep them from the evil." What the 
Saviour here prays the Father to do the 
honest professor of religion will himself 
endeavor to do — that is, keep himself from 
the evil to which he is exposed while in the 
world. 

That there is evil in the world admits of 
no question. The policy of the world in its 
best forms is a policy which originates with 
the world and terminates upon the world. 
Directly it knows nothing of a God before, 
above or beyond the world. It never pro- 
poses to make men religious. It has no 
facilities to offer them in this direction. The 
religious man pursuing his aim as such will 
find himself in the position of a vessel beat- 
ing its way by every device into port in the 
face of an opposing tide and contrary winds. 
The adverse power of the world does not 
so much lie in its gross forms of opposition 
to the kingdom of God as in that large class 



128 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



of occupations and enjoyments in which, it 
is said, a religious man may engage without 
ceasing to be religious. These occupations 
and enjoyments constitute a kind of com- 
mon territory in which the Christian and 
the worldly man may meet. The policy of 
the world extends over it, or the worldly 
man would not be found there. Can the 
Christian enter it without being imbued with 
this policy? Can he consort there with 
men of the world without becoming like 
them, and so ceasing to be religious? 

Here is the difficulty of his position ; and 
hence the need of the counsel: Beware 
of these associations and surroundings, 
through which the policy of an irreligious 
world is operating, lest you be brought un- 
der the dominion of this policy. The voice 
that invites you into them is a siren voice. 
The evil against which the Saviour prayed 
lies lurking in them, and it becomes you to 
enter them with a cautious foot and to move 
among them with a vigilant eye. 

No man, unless shielded and upheld by 
the grace of God, is proof against the power 
of these worldly associations and surround- 



PERSONAL RELIGION. 



129 



ings. His nature disposes him to accom- 
modate himself to the element in which he 
is placed, and he cannot rely upon natural 
power, therefore, to protect him against the 
influence of that element " Watch and pray 
lest ye enter into temptation/' said the Lord 
to his disciples at a time when he foresaw 
that their natural strength was to be tried 
to the utmost by impending dangers. The 
cases are without number in the history of 
the people of God where men have started 
in their Christian course with the purest 
purposes and the warmest fervor, and after- 
ward, by stepping too far into the stream 
of worldly business or pleasure, or by stay- 
ing in it too long, have lost their steadfast- 
ness and have been swept away into all the 
excesses of a worldly life. 

The Christian cannot go out of the world, 
but he is required not to be conformed to 
the world; and he must therefore guard 
himself against the transforming power of 
the world by keeping himself in contact and 
association with those patterns of life which 
belong to the kingdom of God. He must 
check the growing weight of the attractions 



130 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

of a worldly life by loading the opposite 
scale with a preponderating weight of spirit- 
ual interests and enjoyments. In the world 
he must appear as one abroad. In the fel- 
lowship of Christian minds, and in those 
scenes and occupations in which he may 
meet and converse with his Lord, he must 
find his home. O follower of Jesus, when 
you feel your relish for the exchange, the 
club-room or the haunts of social amuse- 
ment exceeding and impairing your relish 
for the prayer-meeting, the religious con- 
ference or the society of your pious friends, 
be admonished that the pulse of spiritual 
life is declining, and that the danger of 
which your Master forewarned you under 
the name " the evil which is in the world" 
is becoming imminent in your case ! 

V. 

The cultivation of religion will hardly be 
prosecuted unless a deep sense of eternal 
things and an eternal world is kept alive 
in the heart. 

The ".powers of the world to come" need 
to be set over against the powers of the 



PERSONAL RELIGION. I 3 I 

world that now is. How constantly the dis- 
ciples are stimulated to fidelity and watch- 
fulness by references in the New Testament 
to the coming of the Lord ! How earnestly 
the Christian racer is exhorted to keep his 
goal in view ! How the fainting believer 
is rallied by the call to look away from the 
things which are seen and temporal to those 
which are not seen and eternal ! It is the 
waiting for the Bridegroom that keeps the 
servant ready. The love of a world in 
which he naturally has so many interests, 
and with which he is so intimately associ- 
ated, needs to be tempered for the Christian 
by cherishing aspirations after the higher 
one to which, as a joint-heir with Christ, he 
is destined ; and the ardor with which treas- 
ure on earth is pursued must be moderated 
by a spiritual thrift which seeks to lay up 
treasure in heaven. 

The traveler about to pass into a foreign 
country naturally anticipates the prepara- 
tion required for his residence there and 
makes it beforehand. In the same way the 
Christian pilgrim will in all things aim to 
make his use of the present world subordi- 



132 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

nate to his well-being in the next. It is the 
man who habitually keeps his mind impress- 
ed with the transitory nature of the condi- 
tion in which he is now placed, and forecasts 
the momentous state into which he is about 
tc be introduced, who will be most likely to 
be found amidst all his worldly environ- 
ments with his ear on the watch for the signal 
of departure and with his preparation for 
that event all complete. He will be most 
likely to avoid that "minding of the flesh" 
which is "enmity against God/' and which 
hinders all spiritual growth, and to culti- 
vate that " holiness without which no man 
can see the Lord " In the quaint words of 
the saintly Rutherford, " the instinct of na- 
ture maketh a man love his mother-country 
above all countries ; the instinct of renewed 
nature and supernatural grace will lead you 
to such and such works— as to love your 
country above, to sigh to be clothed with 
your house not made with hands, and to 
call your borrowed prison here below a bor- 
rowed prison, and to look upon it servant- 
like and pilgrim-like ; and the pilgrim eye 
and look is a disdainful-like, discontented 



PERSONAL RELIGION, 



133 



cast of his eye, his heart crying after his 
eye, 'Fy! fy! This is not like my country !' " 

VI. 

It ought perhaps to be added, for the en- 
couragement of the faithful Christian, that 
growth in religion does not necessarily make 
itself known to the consciousness. It may be 
going on where there is no sign which the 
subject of it can detect Insensibly the 
child springs up into the man. Insensi- 
bly the true disciple advances in spiritual 
capacity and stature. He will never see 
the time when he will not need to struggle 
after further advancement The larger the 
measure of his attainments, the higher will 
rise his ideal He may seem not to be 
growing ; but if the Spirit of God be in him, 
he is doing so. Despondency must not for 
a moment be entertained by the honest 
follower of Christ Vigilance and exertion 
must never be relaxed. Infirmities may cling 
to him with an inveterate tenacity, besetting 
sins may show their vitality after years of 
repression, weakness or inadvertence may 
betray him into falls just when he is per- 



134 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

suadinor himself he is most secure ; but if 
from every failure and delinquency he rises 
with a more determined purpose to follow 
after Christ, that purpose is the sign of a 
life which is perhaps even growing more 
robust by overcoming the obstructions it 
encounters. The very effort to subdue 
corruption in one department of the soul 
may be the means of imperceptibly gener- 
ating or developing grace in other depart- 
ments. The evidence of progress in religion 
is to be found, not in the actual attainment 
of perfection, but in the patient and perse- 
vering effort to attain it. This is all the 
evidence that St. Paul had. " Brethren," 
he says (Phil. iii. 13), "I count not myself 
to have apprehended, but this one thing I 
do : forgetting those things which are be- 
hind, and reaching forth unto those things 
which are before, I press toward the mark 
for the prize of the high calling of God in 
Christ Jesus." And by the same evidence 
everv Christian can assure himself of the 
same fact. 



CHAPTER VII. 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 

THE conduct of the church-member 
must in some way be affected by his 
union with the church. 

This is to be expected; because, first, 
association or partnership always obliges a 
man to consult the will of his associates or 
partners; and, second, the church being an 
organization created for certain ends, each 
member of it is charged with an obligation 
to pursue those ends. 

The man who after he has united with 
the church practically ignores the relation, 
and holds himself aloof from the corporate 
life and action of the church, is repeating 
the fallacy of the man who refuses to join 
the church on the ground that he can be as 
good a Christian out of the church as in it, 
In fact, he is adding inconsistency to unrea- 

135 



136 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

sonableness and had better never have 
entered the church at all. Such inert mem- 
bers are a dead-weight upon the church 
rather than an accession to its force. 

The followers of Christ constitute a house- 
hold, and a household that has its distinct in- 
terests and duties. "All ye are brethren.," 
said Christ (Matt, xxiii. 8), which means 
that every professed disciple of the Lord is 
bound to show himself a brother to his 
fellow-disciples. St. Paul, speaking of 
Christians, says (1 Cor. xii. 20), "Now are 
they many members, but one body.' 1 The 
-one body" — the church — has a life of its 
own which can be distinguished from the 
life of the several members, and yet is con- 
stituted by the united lives of the several 
members. The human body is a type ot 
the church, composed of a diversity of 
members, so that each member is required 
in its acting to regard the well-being ot 
the other members. The foot for instance, 
must be governed in the use it makes of 
itself by a regard to the interests of the hand ; 
and the eye, by a regard to the interests of 
the ear. 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



137 



Besides, every church-member engages 
by a positive covenant to make the purposes 
for which the church exists his own. As it is 
the duty of every man who professes to be 
a follower of Christ to attach himself to his 
Church, so it is his duty— and a duty which 
he solemnly acknowledges by his connection 
with the church— to contribute his propor- 
tion of that efficiency which is required in 
order to enable the Church to execute the 
ministry which has been assigned to it by 
its divine Head. This ministry includes, 
first, certain offices to be performed to the 
body itself, and, second, certain offices to be 
performed to the world at large. 

I. 

In carrying out this ministry, evidently, 
every church-member should feel and ex- 
press a hearty interest in the affairs of the 
church. 

It is to be supposed that he had a definite 
motive in attaching himself to the Church 
and in soliciting membership in the partic- 
ular church which he has joined. That 
motive should exhibit itself just as clearly 



138 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



in his subsequent conduct. What concerns 
the church, it should be henceforth seen, is 
a matter of personal concern to him. 

It might seem supererogatory to give 
such counsel as this, and yet facts show 
that there is an occasion for it Multitudes 
enter the Christian Church apparently 
without the least idea that they are thereby 
charging themselves with a specific set of 
corporate obligations. As in the matter of 
embracing Christ they were acting entirely 
in a private capacity, they are apt to carry 
the same feeling of isolation into the act of 
entering into the visible community of be- 
lievers — an act which they regard as merely 
complementary to the other. Their solici- 
tudes are therefore limited to themselves. 
They overlook the fact that in identifying 
themselves with this community they are 
identifying themselves with a living organ- 
ism that gets its life and efficiency from the 
contributions of each constituent member. 

Or if this fact is not entirely overlooked, 
the church-member may come to feel that 
he is fitted to occupy only a negative position 
in the church by reason of his low estimate 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



1 39 



of his personal abilities or his obscure social 
standing. The result is that such persons 
remain to a great extent strangers in the 
family into which they have been adopted. 
They are rather lodgers in the house of 
God than active members of the household. 
They are like the passengers of a ship, who, 
having been duly booked, feel that they 
have nothing to do but to sit quietly and be 
conveyed to their destination. They take 
it for granted that the seamen will attend 
to the management of the ship. This is 
to misread altogether the terms of their 
enlistment. They are the seamen, not the 
passengers ; parties charged with the cus- 
tody and conduct of a cargo, not repre- 
sentatives of that cargo. It was " not to be 
ministered unto, but to minister/' that the 
Son of man came (Matt. xx. 28), and his 
followers must enter into his service and 
kingdom in the same spirit. 

The actual exhibition of this spirit will 
depend upon the degree with which the 
professor of religion associates himself in 
interest and sympathy with the church to 
which he has attached himself. And, there- 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



fore, he needs to be admonished to see that 
his heart goes with his profession. " No 
man," said Jesus (Luke ix. 62), " having put 
his hand to the plough, and looking back" 
■ — or forgetting that his business is to drive 
the plough forward— lk is fit for the kingdom 
of God/' And as another consideration in 
favor of the duty I am enjoining it may be 
suggested that it is probable those who 
hold themselves aloof from church fellow- 
ship and church work will become com- 
plainers and unfriendly critics of what their 
brethren are doing. The men who do not 
plough are apt to occupy themselves with 
uncharitable faultfinding with the efforts of 
those who are attempting to plough, and so 
put themselves in the unenviable position 
of hinderers of the Lord's work, 

II. 

Every church-member is entrusted, to 
some degree, with the maintaining of the 
character which the Church is intended, in the 
plan of its Founder, to illustrate, He is to 
be the type, the living representative, of 
that " holy nation," that " peculiar people," 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



which the followers of the Saviour are said 
to constitute. 

In executing this trust he has a duty to 
perform first to his fellow-Christians. He 
is to exert such an influence as his circum- 
stances and abilities allow in favor of that 
piety which is the characteristic of the spirit- 
ual family to which he belongs. He is to 
give light to others, as he in turn is to 
receive light from them. He may hold only 
a taper, and they a torch ; but the taper 
can add to the light of the torch, or a taper 
brightly blazing may even replenish the wan- 
ing light of an expiring torch. No man is 
without influence. By the power of ex- 
ample, if in no other way, he may affect 
others and contribute his share to the work 
of edifying the Church of God. No truly 
consistent, devout and godly church-member 
lives unnoticed or fails to quicken duller 
souls by the clear shining of his light. 

Then, in the second place, there is an 
influence to be exerted in impressing the 
world with the divine specialty of the religion 
of Christ. Every church-member may be, 
and ought to be, an u epistle" of piety so 



142 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



legibly written that it may be " known and 
read of all men," and written, I may add, in 
such celestial characters that all men may 
be convinced that it is the product of the 
Holy Spirit. It is not the excellence of its 
creed nor of its government nor of its modes 
of worship which gives credit to a church in 
the eyes of worldly men. It is the exactness 
with which the members of a church fulfill 
the rigid practical tests which worldly men 
will be sure to apply to them. Inconsistent 
and irregular professors of religion, it is 
no exaggeration to say, are more effective 
enemies to the cause of Christ than the 
bitterest opponents to be found in the ranks 
of infidelity. What the Church ought to 
be as "the pillar and ground of the truth," 
and as the body of Christ animated by his 
Spirit, each particular Christian ought to 
be in his measure and sphere. 

III. 

It follows from this that every church- 
member ought to endeavor to qtialify him- 
self for usefulness. 

A talent which has never been exercised 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 1 43 



or called into practice places its possessor 
in a position not differing much from that 
of the man who, having received a talent, 
deliberately goes and hides it in a napkin. 
Two mites which a poor widow gave to the 
Lord were acknowledged by him. Every 
Christian probably has at his command a 
source of influence equivalent to these two 
mites. In fact, until the trial is honestly 
made, no one knows what gifts have been 
laid in his keeping. Poor as the distrustful 
disciple may deem himself, spiritually or 
intellectually, he can easily find some one 
else who is poorer, whose deficiencies can 
be supplied even out of his scanty resources. 

The art of being useful, like all other arts, 
is to be acquired by practice. No man 
knows the ability there is in him till, like 
the spark struck from the steel, it has been 
brought out by the stroke of effort. In the 
different departments of religious work laid 
out for itself by any active church, such as 
Sabbath- and mission-schools, prayer-meet- 
ings, benevolent associations and evangeli- 
cal visitation and labor, an opportunity is 
offered for the use of every kind of talent; 



144 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

and every kind of talent is usually welcomed 
by those who superintend these depart- 
ments. At all events, the home and the 
family form a sphere in which the humblest 
individual may do good. 

Particularly I would suggest that the 
prayer-meeting— which is eminently a social 
institution where Christians seek to be 
helpers of one another's faith and joy— lays 
a special claim upon the male members of 
a church. A meeting for prayer implies, 
of course, that among the parties present 
there are some who are able and willing to 
offer prayer. It is not said that all present 
are under an obligation to do this, for it is 
evident that the gifts which qualify a person 
profitably to lead the minds of others in this 
exercise are not indiscriminately granted to 
all Christians. But it is just as evident that 
if the prayer-meeting is to be sustained, an 
obligation rests upon some — and upon a 
sufficient number— of a congregation to see 
that this duty is performed. The question, 
therefore, ought to press itself upon the 
mind of every conscientious church-member, 
"Can I not in this way serve the church?" 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



145 



The reluctance which is naturally felt to the 
performance of a public service like this is 
not a sufficient reason for concluding that 
the obligation does not exist, for many a 
duty has to be performed at the cost of self- 
denial. Where the voice of the church 
distinctly calls for the rendering of such a 
service at the hands of any of its members, 
it is probably safe to conclude that it is their 
duty to render it ; and it is equally safe to 
expect that the grace which is promised to 
all believers in every time of need will upon 
trial successfully carry them through all the 
difficulties which beset it. 

The man who is accustomed to offer 
prayer to God in secret and in audible 
words, as it is— at least sometimes— well to 
do, and who in addition conducts worship 
in his family, as all Christian householders 
ought to do, will find that he has at hand 
all the subjects and all the phrases which 
are needed at the prayer-meeting. The 
ambition which aims at making a fine prayer 
is not only out of place on such an occasion, 
but ought to be repressed as a positive 
offence against God. The social prayer is 
10 



146 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

generally most seasonable and effective 
when it is simple and short. Considering 
the benefit which may be communicated 
to pious souls through the medium of a 
prayer offered by another— a benefit which 
every Christian has experienced— the ability 
to pray for and with others is surely a tal- 
ent which ought to be coveted. 

The predicament in which a professedly 
religious man finds himself when the request 
is made to him by some suffering or dying 
fellow-being, " Pray for me," and the reply 
has to be given, " I cannot," is a sad one. It 
is one which has often occurred. Surely it 
is one which ought never to have occurred. 
The follower of Christ ought to be as ready 
to respond to the appeal " Pray for me" as 
his Master was to give an answer to his 
disciples' request, " Lord, teach us to pray." 

IV. 

The church-member should be a coadju- 
tor with his brethren in every authorized 
effort to support and propagate Christianity. 

The church which can hear the Lord say, 
" Go ye into all the world and preach the 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



147 



gospel to every creature " (Mark xvi. 15), 
and yet refuse to engage in such efforts, is 
like the son who to his father's command, 
" Go work to-day in my vineyard/' replied, 
"I will not" (Matt. xxi. 28). It is belieing 
its character as a church. 

Now, a church is an organized body and 
does its work in an orderly and regular 
way. It is under a divinely-constituted 
government It is the duty of the gov- 
erning officers to see that the church is 
prosecuting its appropriate benevolent and 
evangelical labors, and it is to be presumed 
that these officers, from their position and 
from the directness of their responsibility, 
will be best able to define the kind of labors 
in which the body of Christ's followers ought 
at any time to engage. The faithful church- 
member will therefore accord to the govern- 
ing powers of his church an authority to di- 
rect him in this matter. He will accept the 
system of operations devised by his church 
for its members as a good one, and will feel 
himself under obligation to yield it his sup- 
port unless a clear conviction of his duty to 
God constrains him to do otherwise. 



148 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

The position that church-authorities have 
no right to prescribe to the private member 
his duty in this respect, and that he may 
lawfully withhold his support from any 
church enterprise because he does not see 
the expediency of it or because he does not 
deem it as important as some other enter- 
prise, is undoubtedly a wrong one. Church- 
members who, for instance, oppose missions 
among the heathen, as some do, on these 
grounds, although the judgment of the 
deliberative and governing authorities of 
the church has unanimously pronounced the 
work to be effected by such missions to be 
one which Christian people cannot overlook 
without expressing disloyalty to their Lord, 
are failing to acknowledge as they ought to 
do the authority of those who are appointed 
to rule over and admonish them. A certain 
amount of obedience to those who are 
charged with the oversight of the house of 
God is due from those who have come under 
the household law. 

Such schemes of benevolent and evan- 
gelistic work as have been devised by the 
church will be adopted by every well-dis- 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 



149 



posed church-member as an object of per- 
sonal interest and sustained to the best of 
his ability. In fact, these schemes are meth- 
ods devised for him and facilities furnished 
to him by the church for the doing of his 
own private work. They are not to be 
looked upon as an imposition. They create 
no new obligation, but are rather helps to 
the Christian in discharging an obligation 
already existing. A poor-fund in the church, 
under the management of the deacons, only 
gives him the opportunity, through what he 
contributes to it, of more easily reaching 
the poor, whom as a follower of Christ he 
was already under an obligation to relieve. 
The Board or the committee of Domestic 
Missions to which he is occasionally asked 
to make a contribution is only an interme- 
diate agent proposing to aid him in doing 
a part which is already incumbent on him 
in the work of sending the gospel to the 
destitute. 

It follows from this that every church- 
member ought to place giving to religious 
objects alongside of praying or communing 
at the Lord's table in his scheme of relig- 



I50 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

ious living. The church is required to 
present to God the spectacle of a people 
" zealous of good works " just as distinctly 
as it is required to present to him that of a 
people zealous for devotional rites or sacra- 
mental solemnities. All the elements which 
belong to the principle of piety — such as 
faith, love, gratitude, zeal for God's honor, 
and so on — are brought into exercise in the 
act of religious giving as truly as in acts of 
worship. For this reason this act is prop- 
erly admitted among the forms of worship 
practiced in the public devotions of the Sab- 
bath, and every worshiper should feel the 
same obligation to join in it that he feels to 
take part in the prayers and the psalms. 

It is noticeable with what explicitness the 
Scriptures give directions as to the per- 
formance of this act of worship. Thus, they 
teach, first, that it is to be performed with 
a willing mind: " God loveth a cheerful 
giver " (2 Cor. ix. 7) ; second, that it is to be 
performed with a pure desire to honor God 
and without any stinting as to measure : " He 
that giveth let him do it with simplicity" 
(Rom. xii. 8) ; third, that the offering is to 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. I$I 



bear a proportion to each individual's abil- 
ity : " Let every one of you lay by him in 
store as God hath prospered him" (i Cor, 
xvi. 2) ; and fourth, that it should be per- 
formed as a continuous and systematic ex- 
ercise, and be provided for in advance of 
special occasions by every man's setting 
apart " on the first day of the week " or at 
regular times a portion of his means for 
religious uses. Such giving, if universally 
practiced, would furnish the church with 
the ability to carry forward all its enter- 
prises, and would return a hundred-fold 
blessing to the souls of those concerned 
in it, 

V. 

It is clear from this statement of his du- 
ties that the church-member needs to keep 
himself informed in regard to much that be- 
longs to the economic life of the church. 

The ignorance which prevails amongst 
the professed followers of the Lord in 
reference to many things which are funda- 
mental to their right religious living is de- 
plorable. It may not be possible for every 
member of a church to know everything 



152 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



which it would be profitable for him to 
know, but it certainly is desirable that 
every one should possess himself of all 
the knowledge which is requisite to give 
consistency and symmetry to his Christian 
walk. He should know enough of the 
constitution of his church to be satisfied 
that it rests upon a good scriptural and his- 
torical warrant, and on this account mainly 
should conscientiously adhere to it. He 
should know enough of its system of doc- 
trine, and of the correspondence of this 
with the word of God, to be enabled intel- 
ligently to accept it. He should know 
enough of its organic structure to under- 
stand" the names and the functions of its 
various officers and courts and to follow it 
in the working of its different departments. 
He should take an interest in the proceed- 
ings of church-councils. He should ac- 
quaint himself with the outlying field in 
which the church is called to work, and 
with the nature and progress of the work 
which the church is actually doing in that 
field. He should know what every church 
agency he is asked to support means, why 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH, I S3 

it has been called into existence and why 
it claims his support. 

To acquire this knowledge, even in a 
moderate degree, will of course demand 
some effort in the way of reading and re- 
search. Especially it will require the aid 
of the religious periodical. The history of 
the Church from year to year — almost from 
week to week — is stamped now upon the 
pages of the religious newspaper and mag- 
azine and spread before the eyes of the 
world. It is so important a record that no 
honest Christian can consent to be ignorant 
of it ; it is so accessible that there is hardly 
any one who cannot afford to possess him- 
self of it. Every church-member should be 
the reader of a Church paper, and perhaps 
it is not too much to say that every church 
should make provision for supplying with 
such a paper every member who is too 
poor to subscribe for one. 

VI. 

It may now be added that, apart from his 
duty as a pious man to worship God, it is 
incumbent on the member of a church, as a 



154 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

part of the duty which he owes to his fel- 
low-Christians and the community around 
him, to be punctual and regular in his at- 
tendance upon public worship. 

" Not forsaking the assembling of our- 
selves together" is associated (Heb. x. 25) 
with the duty of " considering one another 
and provoking unto love and good works." 
The bond of sympathy is weakened, the 
community of interest is abated, in any 
congregation, by the withdrawal of the 
countenance and support of any of its 
members. Each heart is kindled into a 
warmer glow by the presence and the co- 
operation of another heart that beats in 
unison with itself, and the lack of heartiness 
which is manifested by the professed friends 
of religion when they fail to appreciate and 
join in the assemblies of their brethren 
operates just as decidedly in chilling the 
heartiness of those who are thus aban- 
doned. Minister and people alike feel ag- 
grieved by such an exhibition of disaf- 
fection. 

When the professed friends of religion 
can so lightly esteem its ordinances, what 



RELIGION IN THE CHURCH. 155 

must be the effect upon the minds of those 
who are naturally inclined to deny their 
authority ? When such discrediting of the 
institutions of Christianity is witnessed 
among its avowed adherents, what can be 
expected but an emboldened opposition to 
them on the part of the worldly-minded, 
and a general rush of the community into 
Sabbath desecration and every other form 
of popular irreligion ? 

The altars of God are the bulwarks of 
virtue and morality as well as of piety, and 
it is the saddest of all sights to see the 
hands of the followers of Jesus concerned 
in laying them waste. Surely the woe de- 
nounced by the Saviour upon the man by 
whom an offence cometh will hang over the 
head of the disciple who so discourages the 
hearts of his fellow-believers, and so lends 
his endorsement to the profane multitude 
who say of Zion, " Rase it, rase it, even to 
the foundation thereof!" 



CHAPTER VIII. 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE, 

IMPORTANT as is religion in the 
Church, it is, if possible, more import- 
ant outside of the Church. 

It is probable that piety in the soul of a 
Christian is cultivated and developed as 
much by the hard exercise he has to under- 
go in the world as it is by the observance of 
the ordinances of the Church, just as the 
musician is made by painstaking practice as 
much as by the study of theoretical principles. 
And when we take into view the further 
duty of the Christian to impress the minds 
of worldly persons with the reality and the 
excellency of religion as a governing princi- 
ple in a man's life, the power must be drawn 
almost entirely from the evidences which are 
to be found in his practical deportment. 

Worldly men will naturally discredit the 
claim of any man to be a true Christian 

156 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 157 



who does not show his religion on the 
plane of his worldly life. And the Chris- 
tian should take no exception to this test. 
For religion, being a property of the soul 
or an abiding element in the man himself, 
must be expected to evince its presence 
wherever the man appears and in every- 
thing that he does. In the nature of it, it 
is a permanent, not an intermittent, force. 
It will demonstrate itself like the steady 
shining of the diamond, not like the tran- 
sient sparkle of the dewdrop. It must ex- 
hibit its power in all the circumstances, and 
over all the circumstances, of a man's life, 
in order to show that it is in itself some- 
thing more than a mere circumstance. It 
must reveal itself in the gait of a man's 
daily walk, and not be assumed on set oc- 
casions, like the soldier's measured step on 
parade. 

Further, it is to be considered that by far 
the greater part of every man's time is ne- 
cessarily employed in secular occupations. 
It would be a singular incongruity if a su- 
preme interest like religion were to find a 
place in which to assert its claims or to en- 



158 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

force its authority only in the minimum of 
a man's life. That which is enjoined upon 
men as their first and highest duty cannot 
certainly be thrust away into a fraction of 
the week, so as to be excluded from the 
work of six days and confined to the formal 
exercises of the Sabbath. And, what is of 
more importance still, it is on the field of 
the world that religion is put to its severest 
trials and is required to give the best proof 
of its celestial origin and temper. Till it 
has shown itself competent to maintain its 
ground on this field it cannot demand the 
confidence of worldly men. It cannot be 
stronger than its weakest part. It must 
betray no weak part on that side which is 
especially exposed to the scrutiny of world- 
ly men. If it does, the whole fabric of its 
pretensions falls. Therefore, said the Sa- 
viour (Matt. v. 16), "let your light so shine 
before men that they may see your good 
works and glorify your Father which is in 
heaven." 

The divine lustre of religion must be 
made to shine " before men " by being ex- 
hibited where men resort or in the public 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. I$9 



thoroughfares and market-places. It must 
indicate its presence and power by produ- 
cing "good works 5 ' or works which glorify 
God on a soil where such works are not 
naturally found, or it will fail to fulfill the 
function which the Author of it has assign- 
ed to it. "The true light which lighteth 
every man that cometh into the world " is 
actually to accomplish that which in its 
nature it is adapted to do through the shin- 
ing of the followers of Christ. The dark- 
ness of the world is to be dispelled not 
merely by the teaching of the preacher or 
by the argument of the polemic, but by the 
practical demonstration of the sanctifying 
power of religion afforded by the living 
luminary— the upright and consistent Chris- 
tian. 

What a distinguished Scotch divine has 
said in closing a paper upon modern agnos- 
ticism is true of all the forms of unbelief 
current in the world: "The strongest of 
all anti-agnostic forces — in fact, the one 
great safeguard of humanity against the 
general or final triumph of agnosticism — 
is none other than the redemptive power 



i6o 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



of the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. 
Each one of you — fathers, brothers, sisters 
by simply so living as to show that re- 
ligion is supremely worth believing, may 
do far more to combat the spirit whence 
agnosticism arises than I or any one could 
do by a merely formal written attack upon 
it. The grand argument against anti-re- 
ligious agnosticism is the practical one of 
a consistent and vigorous Christian life — 
the argument which, through God's grace, 
we can all use." 

I. 

In carrying his religion into secular life, 
the Christian is to be careful that it gets, 
through his representation of it, a fair show- 
ing before the eye of the world. 

This Christ asks of his followers, and it is 
all that he asks. He does not expect them 
to improve upon his doctrines or regulations, 
but he does expect them to give to these a 
just setting forth in their character and 
their conduct. The style of manhood which 
is depicted by our Lord and his apostles in 
their teachings is unquestionably amiable 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. IOI 

and beautiful In assuming it human na- 
ture is embellished with every genuine vir- 
tue which can attach to it. When the 
counsel is given, therefore, in Tit. ii. io, 
that believers should " adorn the doctrine 
of God their Saviour in all things/' the 
meaning is, not that they should by any 
devices of their own strive to make this 
doctrine attractive, but that they should 
allow it, through them as its medium, to 
make a clear and full exhibition of the 
attractiveness which intrinsically belongs 
to it. 

God's image in the soul is certainly a 
perfect thing. The study of the Christian 
must be to express that image faultlessly, 
and to keep it from being obscured or 
marred by infirmities of his own. What- 
ever deforms character, as coarseness of 
manner, untidiness of habit, vulgarity in 
speech, irritability of temper or ill-breed- 
ing in any form, is at variance with the 
spirit of the gospel, and can never appear 
in a professor of religion without in some 
degree doing damage to the credit of re- 
ligion. The morbid distempers and the 
11 



l62 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



offensive obliquities to which a man may 
be naturally disposed or to which he has 
become addicted are in the case of the 
Christian more than blemishes in the man: 
they are so many blots on the good name 
of Christianity, and will be noted by the 
enemies of religion as so many evidences 
of its being a pretension rather than a 
divine power in the soul. The censorious 
eyes of the world are at all times upon the 
follower of Christ, and a merciless rigor of 
judgment will be applied by it to his most 
trivial acts. It becomes him, therefore, to 
remember the ordeal to which he is ex- 
posed and in every phase of his life and 
conduct, jealously to maintain " a good re- 
port with them which are without." 

If religion does not improve the nature 
of a man, it will have to bear, at the bar of 
public opinion, the reproach of all the faults 
which adhere to it. The crooked limb may 
have been in the vine originally; but if 
religion does not prune it off, religion will 
be charged with its existence. Hence the 
Scriptures descend to such minuteness in 
portraying the Christian life as to denounce 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIEE. 1 63 

such characters as the " busybody" and the 
"brawler," and to forbid such things as 
" filthiness," " foolish talking" and "jesting" 
as things "which are not convenient" — that 
is, not suitable to the Christian. " Be piti- 
ful," "Be gentle," " Be courteous," are coun- 
sels which they continually reiterate. Relig- 
ion is a refiner's fire in reference to the 
outward man as well as to the inward. St. 
Paul has brought honor to Christianity by 
his delicate sensibility and his gentlemanly 
bearing, as well as by the breadth and power 
of his expositions of truth. The separate- 
ness from the world which the gospel en- 
joins does not mean the abandonment of 
the decencies of life nor the amenities of 
society, and no follower of Christ can dis- 
regard them in his intercourse with his fel- 
low-men without injuring the religion which 
he represents in the same way and to the 
same extent as "dead flies" are said (Eccl. 
x. 1) to corrupt "the ointment of the apoth- 
ecary." 

II. 

To this suggestion it ought to be added 
that religion is not to be recommended to the 



164 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

world by any ostentatious modes of demonstra- 
tion. 

The man who is seeking to advertise 
himself or get credit to himself as a pro- 
fessor of religion, is sacrificing the honor of 
religion in order to honor himself. Unsea- 
sonably introduced or offensively obtruded, 
religion fails to command the respect which 
the follower of Christ should always aim to 
draw to it. Sincerity, consistency and good 
sense are what the shrewd men of the world 
expect to find in a Christian, and what they 
have a right to expect. These forbid the 
use of any factitious methods or any appear- 
ance of study or any resort to the arts of 
display in the practice of religion. Any 
peculiarity which gives a man the air of one 
playing a part will awaken a suspicion as 
to his integrity, and in the case of religion 
will give occasion to its adversaries to brand 
the system itself as an imposture. It is by 
depicting so-called religious characters un- 
der this form — as thrusting their piety for- 
ward in grotesque and unseemly ways, of 
as hanging out the badges of their religion 
in circumstances in which these have no 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 1 65 



place, or as indulging in unreal cant — that 
some of the writers of popular literature 
have sought to bring religion generally 
into discredit and contempt. 

The truly religious man will act relig- 
iously, if I may so express it, without think- 
ing of what he is doing, or at least without 
giving the public any advertisement of the 
fact. He will be simply himself ; which is 
to be the religious man. Except on special 
occasions, it will be by indirect rather than 
by direct methods that he will affirm his 
religion. In performing an act of faith he 
will not sound a trumpet before him, as the 
hypocrites do. He will do it because his 
thought is on God, who seeth in secret, not 
on himself or his fellow-man. He will strive 
to please all men so far as he can do this 
consistently with fidelity to God ; and when 
he has to offend any, he will do it in such a 
way as obliges them to see that he cannot 
please them without offending God. 

III. 

Men of the world will always put facts 
before theories or professions. The Chris- 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



tian must offer facts in mmficatton of his claim 
to be a religious man. 

On the stage of secular life these must be 
facts of a secular sort. In regard to the 
great majority of men, their secular occu- 
pations are made up of the handling and 
making of money, and in their case the use 
of money becomes the index of character. 
The desire for money, as every one knows, 
is apt to become an inordinate passion, 
blighting the more generous affections of 
the soul and converting the man into the 
mere cold lover of self. Every one knows, 
too, that the mere accumulation of money 
is in itself a childish, not to say ignoble, end 
for a rational being to set before him. The 
love of money in its grossest form makes 
the miser, and the miser is universally re- 
garded as a despicable character. The 
spirit of the miser is in every man who 
makes money-getting, without regard to 
the use of it, the supreme object of his 
life and the supreme source of his enjoy- 
ment. That spirit even the world brands 
as disloyalty to the better instincts of hu- 
man nature. How much more flagrantly 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. l6? 



must it appear in the case of the Christian 
to be disloyal to God ! 

The professor of religion is bound, there- 
fore, to throw into his pursuit of wealth a 
moderation of temper which the policy of 
the world does not require. Though stand- 
ing side by side with the mere money-get- 
ter in this pursuit, he must show that he is 
animated by a different motive, and that his 
love to God is a stronger principle than his 
desire for money. His position as a party 
to this pursuit is not wrong. Occupation 
is one of the conditions of man's well-being, 
and occupation aims at results which are 
conveniently represented by money. It is 
right for the religious man to seek wealth, 
but not simply for wealth's sake. In its 
proper place it is a means for satisfying his 
needs, gratifying his wholesome tastes and 
enlarging his capacity for serving God by 
serving his generation. It would seem to 
be a reasonable proposition that a man's 
desire for money ought to be regulated 
and limited by his desire for that which 
money enables him to do, and that when 
this latter desire has been fully provided 



i68 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



for the former one ought to cease to 
operate. 

Would it not be a strong illustration of 
the power of religious principle if the Chris- 
tian were some time to be seen stopping in 
his pursuit of wealth and saying., "I have 
enough.'' and devoting the residue of his 
life, as a sort of Sabbath-resting after his 
toils, to such occupations as directly minis- 
ter to the cause of benevolence and relig- 
ion ? The Church needs just such men of 
opulence and leisure to fill its offices, and 
the world wants them to carry on its 
schemes of reform and charity. 

Or if an escape from the habits and the 
implications of business be an impossibility, 
what is to hinder the religious man to whom 
God has given enough for all his own wants 
from making God, if I may so express it, a 
partner in his future operations and pros- 
ecuting his business and gathering in his 
crains in the interest of God and for the 
furtherance of his kingdom? Instances 
have occurred where men have so made 
themselves literally the stewards of God, 
illustriously showing that riches, which the 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



169 



Saviour declared to be so generally a fatal 
bar in the path to heaven, may be converted 
into the golden stairway which leads the 
possessor directly into it. 

If cupidity of disposition is to be avoided 
by the Christian, I may now remark more 
emphatically, All dishonesty in practice is 
to be avoided by him. The world never 
forgives an act of fraud, and, we may say, 
never forgets it. A pecuniary loss inflicted 
on one man by another is a wrong which 
rankles longest in the memory of the in- 
jured party and is the hardest to be con- 
doned by the offender. On this account 
the professor of religion should look upon 
the contracting of a debt as an act which 
brings him into fearful proximity to the 
region of possible dishonesty. The im- 
periling of the rights of others by any 
presumptuous adventure in business, or a 
resort to equivocal measures to escape a 
just obligation to others, or a complicity 
in any of the other thousand forms of 
loose practice or sharp practice which are 
current in the world, should be repelled 
from his thought by the follower of Christ 



170 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

as promptly as his Master repelled the 
suggestion of the devil that he should cast 
himself from the pinnacle of the temple in 
the expectation that the angels would pro- 
tect him from harm. 

The religion of Christ has no more effect- 
ive enemy than is to be found in the per- 
son of the professor who has suffered his 
name to become blackened with an impu- 
tation of dishonesty. The Church is every- 
where bleeding from the wounds inflicted 
by its false or heedless members who have 
been betrayed into wrong-doing by their 
intemperate lust for gain. 

IV. 

Afflictions, troubles and disappointments 
fill so large a part of the ordinary life of 
men that they constitute a common ground 
upon which the Christian and the man of 
the world may meet and compare their 
principles. It is to be expected that relig- 
ion will show its power by affording to the 
possessor of it some advantage which the 
irreligious man does not possess under 
the pressure of these painful experien.es. 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIEE. 



171 



Apart from religion there are no resources 
accessible to men in their times of adver- 
sity but such as are found in fortitude or 
the passive acceptance of the inevitable, in 
the diversion of mind afforded by occupation, 
in the promises of hope or in the soothing 
influences of time. These are as open to 
the Christian as they are to others, but in 
his case faith supplies additional and im- 
measurably superior solaces and sup- 
ports. 

It does not promise him exemption from 
the tribulations which are common to all 
men, but it does profess to give him a mas- 
tery over the tribulations of the world to 
which men naturally cannot attain. Men 
of the world have, therefore, a right to 
watch the deportment of the Christian 
under the discipline of sorrow, and to de- 
mand from him in the trying exigences of life 
the evidence of a power in his principles to 
sustain him of which they, in their lack of 
faith, are destitute. 

Much may be done for the honor of 
Christ by his followers in such testing- 
times by maintaining a temper and a cle- 



1^2 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

meanor in harmony with the doctrines and 
the promises of the gospel. The pain which 
accompanies misfortune in any form, the 
anguish of a bereaved heart or the stun- 
ning effect of a commercial catastrophe are 
experiences which irreligious men under- 
stand as well as religious ones, and any ad- 
vantage possessed by the latter in these cir- 
cumstances is something which the former 
are capable of appreciating. It is a good 
time, therefore, to glorify God before an 
unbelieving world when the believer is " in 
the fires." It is his privilege as well as his 
duty so to conduct himself under the re- 
verses of life that his neighbors shall see 
that a divine Comforter is with him in the 
furnace. 

The annals of the Church, from the times 
of the apostles down, are full of testimonials 
to the power of religion to brace the soul 
with courage in the face of dangers before 
which nature quails, and to make it patient 
under sufferings against which nature re- 
volts ; but each generation and each com- 
munity calls for daily living attestations of 
this power to meet the daily living skepti- 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



173 



cism of the world. Each follower of Christ, 
in passing through his own " valley of weep- 
ing," should be ready to give such testi- 
mony to the abiding faithfulness and the 
sufficient grace of his Lord. To be able 
to give it when the demand for it arises 
which may come suddenly, it is necessary 
the Christian should habitually live in near 
fellowship with God. It is when the eye 
has been familiar with Christ by day that 
the hand can find him in the darkness of 
the night. It is the heart that has carried 
in it the essence of faith and love in its 
sound state that will, when broken by 
adversity, 

" like the plants that throw 
Their fragrance from the wounded part, 
Breathe sweetness out of woe." 

It is equally incumbent on the Christian 
to prove to the world that in virtue of his 
religion he is superior to the detei'iorating 
influences of prosperity. 

These influences are perhaps even more 
dangerous to a Christian's steadfastness 
than are those of adversity. To be in 



174 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

possession of that which worldly men wor- 
ship with an idolatrous love., and yet to 
keep himself free from this idolatrous love, 
is the hard task set before the wealthy fol- 
lower of Christ. It is the exhibition of a 
radical distinction between him and worldly 
men which the latter are bound to notice. 
It is like the proof of his religious principle 
which Daniel gave when he turned away 
from the provision of the king's meat and 
wine which was offered him and chose to 
subsist upon pulse and water. To keep 
this proof always clearly revealed to the 
eyes of his fellow-men in his daily inter- 
course with them is the duty of the 

r e <^ 

man, and it is a duty which should remind 
him that if he needs divine grace to keep 
him from fault in the acquisition of wealth 
he needs it just as much to enable him to 
maintain his integrity in the use of it. 

There are two obvious ways in which 
prosperity may lead the Christian into a 
departure from his principles. The first 
grows out of the fact that wealth ^ i\ es 
portance to the possessor of it. The nat- 
ural result of this fact is that he should be- 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



come inflated with a sense of his importance. 
The second follows upon the other fact — * 
that wealth presents to the possessor of it 
the means of indefinite indulgence. The 
natural effect of this fact is to excite love of 
indulgence. A sense of one's importance 
is, of course, a magnifying of self ; and as 
self engrosses the contemplation of the 
mind other objects recede, until all affinity 
with them is lost sight of and the man with- 
draws into a condition of cold isolation. 

Let the prosperous Christian guard 
against this natural propensity. Let him 
show that wealth has not blunted or con- 
tracted his sympathy with his kind, and 
that his heart has not become encased in 
the gold which his hands have gathered. 
The follower of Christ must exhibit before 
the world the grand spectacle of a man 
who, while he is lifted by his riches above 
participation in the wants of the multitudes 
below him, still cherishes with special care 
the Christian charities which make these 
wants an object of personal interest. The 
other danger — that of an excessive devo- 
tion to the indulgences which wealth places 



Ij6 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

within the reach of its possessor— is one 
which the Christian needs perhaps still 
more carefully to avoid. 

This duty leads us to a consideration of 
the difficult and delicate question, How far 
may the professor of religion indulge, with- 
out detriment to his own spiritual well-be- 
ing and the honor of religion, in what are 
designated by the comprehensive term 
" worldly amusements " ? This question is 
one which, in a pleasure-loving age like 
the present, is sure to force itself upon the 
attention of every one embarking in a re- 
lio-ious life. It seems entirely reasonable 
to say that in order that a Christian may 
lawfully indulge in these amusements it is 
necessary that he should be well assured 
that in doing so he is not breaking down 
that line of separation which he is required 
always to make manifest between himself 
and the mere man of the world. In deter- 
mining this point it may aid him to reflect 
upon the following facts. 

First, That the very prevalent argument 
that because religion was designed to make 
people cheerful and happy, and because 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



177 



worldly amusements are expressly em- 
ployed to produce this effect, therefore 
religious people may properly indulge in 
these amusements, is a fallacy. It forgets 
that the Christian religion defines cheerful- 
ness and happiness at the same time that 
it sanctions them. It does not resign its 
authority when it approaches the realms of 
pleasure. Here, as in all other departments 
of conduct, it has some limits to fix and 
some distinctions to draw. Its law pre- 
scribes the ways in which men are to be 
cheerful and happy, as well as all their 
other ways of acting. When it invites 
them to rejoice, it surely does not send 
thern to an ungodly world to learn how 
they are to rejoice. The follower of 
Christ is bound to follow him — that is, to 
follow his direction — as much in his amuse- 
ments as in anything else. Christ has never 
given authority to society to direct his fol- 
lowers. By a certain portion of society the 
bacchanalian revel and the excitement of 
the gaming-table are regarded as sources 
of cheerfulness and happiness. Is it to be 
supposed that Christ would bid his follow- 
12 



I78 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

ers take part in these amusements? Who 

will say so ? 

Second. That the plea— which is also very 
frequently urged — that what everybody 
does it must be right for the Christian to 
do, since it cannot be required of him to 
make himself singular or to banish himself 
from society, is equally fallacious. This 
argument will be a good one when every- 
body studies in everything to follow Christ. 
But surely it cannot be a safe rule for the 
Christian to do as the community does 
when that community, to a large extent, 
openly denies Christ and repudiates his 
right to control and guide it. The Chris- 
tian's rule clearly requires him distinctively 
to differ from such a community. 

Third. That worldly amusements, in the 
well-understood sense of that term, mean 
forms of pleasure which have been invented 
by the world. They are not home-born to 
the Christian, but are imported from a 
foreign soil. They do not belong even to 
that general economy under which God 
in his goodness has spread out, as it were, 
a banquet for all his children to enjoy. 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. I 79 



They are something which the cravings of 
men have superadded to that banquet. 
They are the product of a worldly mind, 
suited to a worldly taste. The agents who 
have originated them and who preside over 
them are not the representatives of the 
kingdom of God. 

The radical difference between the Chris- 
tian and the votary of these worldly amuse- 
ments appears in this — that there can be 
no reciprocity in their enjoyments. In his 
association with the worldly man in his 
amusements the Christian makes a con- 
cession which the worldly man will not 
reciprocate. The former is expected to 
affiliate with the latter, but the latter never 
affiliates with the former. No one would 
dream of seeing a frequenter of the theatre 
or of the race-course going with the Chris- 
tian neighbor who had been induced to ac- 
company him to those places of amusement 
to attend the prayer-meeting or the relig- 
ious assembly which that neighbor must be 
supposed to love to attend. The professor 
of religion must drop his distinctive charac- 
ter just in the measure that he identifies 



l8o FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

himself with those who are so alien to him 
in disposition and in taste. He must be- 
come like those who cannot become like 
him ; which is certainly very much the same 
thing as ceasing to act as a Christian. 

The primitive Christians had been ac- 
customed, many of them, in their uncon- 
verted days, to attend the gladiatorial shows 
in which men slaughtered one another for 
the entertainment of the spectators. These 
shows formed one of the worldly amuse- 
ments of the age. They had been invented 
to give pleasure to a brutal appetite. When 
converted, these Christians knew that this 
amusement had never been sanctioned by 
their divine Master, and knew that in coun- 
tenancing it they were compromising their 
character as followers of Christ and throw- 
ing themselves into the ranks of his ene- 
mies. They abandoned them, and it is 
said that through their opposition the bar- 
barous sport was finally abolished. 

Fourth. That worldly amusements are 
extreme forms in which the love of pleasure 
seeks to gratify itself. They are intemper- 
ate indulgences, as distinguished from tern- 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. l8l 



perate ones. Now, intemperance or a tend- 
ency to go to an extreme in the gratifica- 
tion of one's appetites is an evidence of 
a derangement in nature. It shows that 
what ought to be a wholesome craving for 
pleasure has become a feverish thirst. The 
world says that this thirst must be satisfied, 
and invents pleasures for the purpose of 
satisfying it. Religion says that this tend- 
ency of a deranged nature must be re- 
sisted. It opposes the law of moderation 
to the law of excess. As has been stated 
in a former paragraph, the Christian is re- 
quired, even in the indulgence of sorrow, 
to put limits to the expression of his grief, 
and to avoid the extremes of despondency 
and woe. And shall not religion equally 
set bounds to his hilarity? Can he law- 
fully run to the extremes to which nature 
would lead him in this direction when he is 
forbidden to do so in the other? Surely 
the conscientious Christian ought to feel 
debarred from following an unbelieving 
world into the regions of pleasure by the 
same principle which restrains him from 
abandoning himself, as nature leads worldly 



1 82 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



men to do, to the sway of a hopeless sor- 
row. Self-denial in either case is demanded 
of the follower of Christ for Christ's sake. 

Fifth. That the character of worldly 
amusements is to be estimated very much 
by the concomitants which they gather 
around them. 

In its simple form an amusement may be 
admitted to be innocent, and yet, from the 
incidents which are invariably associated 
with it, may be altogether objectionable. 
This test is particularly applicable to the 
theatre. " What greater harm," it is often 
asked, " can there be in seeing the drama 
of Hamlet personated on the stage by 
gifted actors than in reading it in Shake- 
speare's works ?" Could the former exer- 
cise be kept free from corrupting adjuncts, 
as the latter is, the answer might be " No 
greater." The Christian may read Hamlet 
as an intellectual entertainment without 
detriment to his religious state. The ex- 
hibition of Hamlet on the stage, however, 
is given for the purpose of deriving a pe- 
cuniary profit from the attendance of the 
public. The public indiscriminately must 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



I8 3 



be attracted. The species of the attraction 
employed is a secondary matter provided 
the end can be reached— that of drawing to- 
gether a paying crowd. Mere intellectual 
gratification would not seem to be sufficient 
to secure on a large enough scale the desired 
attendance, and therefore attractions of 
other sorts — some of them unquestionably 
of a vicious tendency— must be associated 
with the exhibition. 

Friendly to virtue as the advocates of 
the playhouse would make it, they must 
admit that in the adjuncts which seem to 
be inseparable from it it is utterly demor- 
alizing. The same test should be applied 
to the solution of the question as to the 
right of the professor of religion to engage 
in the fashionable dance and the dancing- 
party. 

This is a question which will almost cer- 
tainly demand the consideration of the 
young Christian. Granting that in itself 
dancing is a harmless exercise, and that 
in its simpler forms social dancing does not 
differ from other recreations in which both 
sexes participate, it may still on good 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



grounds be urged that the concomitants 
which have become attached to it in ordi- 
nary practice have placed it in that category 
of dissipated and extravagant pleasures in 
which the religious man cannot consistently 
indulge. As society employs and patron- 
izes it — as a cultivated and elaborate art, 
as an occupation involving a necessity for 
ostentatious dressing, for luxurious festiv- 
ity, for promiscuous association, for the 
consumption of time in preparation for 
and recovery from the period of revelry 
and for risk to bodily health ; as an amuse- 
ment carrying along with it all the adjuncts 
of the modern ball — through its surround- 
ings, dancing has become an entertainment 
so essentially worldly that the Christian 
must apparently take leave of his distinct- 
ive character in taking part in it. It is a 
wise rule in regard to customs as well as 
men to judge them by the company they 
keep. 

Sixth, That the enjoyment derived from 
these worldly amusements is purchased at 
an immense cost. This cost appears in 
the loss which the pursuit of them entails 



RELIGION IN SECULAR LIFE. 



185 



of a capacity to relish other enjoyments. 
False appetites or those which have been 
forced upon nature are stronger than those 
which originally belong to nature, and in 
proportion as they are indulged blunt and 
enfeeble the latter. Devotion to novel- 
reading thus unfits a person to relish 
soberer and sounder literature. The Chris- 
tian who suffers his heart to come under 
the fascinations of worldly pleasure will 
dearly pay for the license he has allowed 
himself. From the numbness which these 
will infuse into his higher spiritual nature, 
he will find himself disqualified in a large 
measure for pure intellectual enjoyment, 
and in a still larger measure for the enjoy- 
ment of the peculiar pleasures which re- 
ligion offers to the genuine living believer. 
His deadened sensibilities will no more re- 
spond to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, 
devout meditation will become a weariness, 
prayer will decline into a heartless form, and 
the Scriptures will cease to be vocal with 
the messages of God. 

The conclusion to which a fair inspection 
of these worldly amusements would lead a 



1 86 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

dispassionate mind would seem to be this 
—that the follower of Christ is required, 
under the most favorable view he can take 
of them, to lay down the rule, "I will in- 
dulge in them with strict moderation, or 
within such bounds as maybe compatible 
with my spiritual well-being ;" and if, upon 
experiment, he finds that moderation is im- 
possible in the case, or that even with it 
these worldly amusements are unfriendly 
to his religious comfort and progress, he 
ought to say, "I will altogether refrain 
from indulging in them." Probably it is 
just here on this ground, where the world 
is addressing its most plausible and seduc- 
tive solicitations to the Church, that the 
dividing-line between the Church and the 
world needs to be most sharply drawn. 



CHAPTER IX, 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 

SO much of the real, genuine life of a 
man is brought into exercise and into 
light in the sphere of the family that per- 
haps it would not be extravagant to say 
that this sphere is the crucial one for the 
follower of Christ. 

If a man be a religious man, he will cer- 
tainly demonstrate the fact at home. If 
there he fails to exemplify that character, 
he leaves all other evidences of it, to say 
the least, open to suspicion. 

The family was the first sanctuary in 
which religion had a visible birth and in 
which it took form and voice — the shrine 
from which divine oracles addressed the 
soul in advance of the prophets' inspired 
utterances. In its very organization — in 
the relations it creates and the offices it 
institutes — it seems to be an earthly pat- 

187 



i88 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



tern of a heavenly economy or kingdom 
which God has been pleased to designate 
as his - house/' and in which he appears as 
presiding as Head over all the inmates and 
gathering them under his wings as his chil- 
dren. The typology of the family is so 
religious that if religion be absent from it, 
it seems as if its essential element were 
wanting. The fact of God's fatherhood 
toward men is mirrored in every spectacle 
of a human parent looking down with lov- 
ing watchfulness upon his little household 
flock, and the reciprocal obligation on the 
part of men to acknowledge this fatherhood 
is symbolized wherever the flock is seen 
looking up with trusting eyes to the pa- 
rents guardian care. 

The interests of the home-life, too, are 
of such a nature as to make it almost in- 
dispensable that God should be acknowl- 
edged and depended upon by the family. 
They impose upon each member the charge 
of the well-being of every other member— 
a charge which in the exercise of it involves 
an indefinite amount of the tenderest solici- 
tude and calls for a measure of power and 



RELIGION IN THE FA MIL Y. 



wisdom which transcends the resources of 
man. A family without God in it is in a 
condition like that of the household from 
which the literal head is absent. At every 
turn it is reminded of its need of his pres- 
ence. It is painfully incomplete without 
him. In the world men may do without 
God ; they cannot do without him at home. 
Things which may be' divorced from him as 
they are regarded in the place of business 
are necessarily associated with him when 
surveyed in the atmosphere of home-life. 
Bankruptcy means loss of property on the 
exchange ; it means the loss of bread in 
the presence of wife and children. The 
fear of it in the former place stimulates to 
exertion ; in the latter it extorts the prayer, 
" Give us this day our daily bread." Sick- 
ness and death may occur in the community 
around us, and we accept them as the in- 
evitable results of the law of nature. They 
enter our doors, and, though it be an infant 
who is the victim, every hand is raised, as 
it were, in resistance, and every voice in- 
vokes the aid of a power above nature 
and cries, " God be merciful to the child !" 



I90 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

Nowhere does God touch us so closely 
or make us so conscious of our dependence 
upon him as in the sphere of these home- 
interests, and nowhere, probably, outside 
of his Bible, can the Christian find a volume 
so adapted to foster and train his religious 
sentiments and principles as that which he 
may find in his home-experiences. 

And surely, I may add, if the desire to 
win others to Christ be a natural feature 
in the mind of a true believer, he will be 
constrained to evince it most conspicuously 
in his intercourse with those who are loved 
by him as he loves his own soul. If a man's 
religion is to be a light anywhere, ought it 
not to be such at the central point of his 
world, and in that little domestic circle with 
which his life is naturally bound up ? The 
force of the obligation to make a faithful, 
and at the same time an attractive, exhi- 
bition of piety here is simply incalculable. 
This consideration is sustained by the 
further thought that if a Christian in his 
family is not making an impression favor- 
able to religion, he is in all likelihood do- 
ing a positive injury to it. The home is 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. I9I 



the spot where the sharpest possible scru- 
tiny is always directed to the walk of the 
professed follower of Christ. The eyes of 
children are watchful organs, and keen as 
they are watchful, and their minds are 
prompt to form judgments upon what they 
see. Instinctively they put confidence in a 
parent, and love to bestow that confidence 
without limit. It is a sad discovery which 
is made when it is found that that confi- 
dence has been misplaced — when a child is 
forced to conclude, through the faults or 
the inconsistencies observed in a parent, 
that his religion is not what it professes 
to be. And it is as disastrous as it is sad, 
for it shakes the confidence of the child in 
truth itself. What can be confided in when 
a parent has proved false? Perhaps, if 
the matter were closely sifted, it would be 
found that the actual deviations from recti- 
tude which the younger members of a 
family see in the conduct of their seniors 
constitute the reason why they are so 
frequently unaffected by the instructions 
they receive from their lips. 



192 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



I. 

The fact is first to be noted that there 
are peculiar difficulties in the way of main- 
taining a perfectly religious character in 
the family. 

The importunate demands and the ab- 
sorbing nature of household cares are 
familiar to every woman who has a home 
to superintend. These cares are apt to 
drive from the mind the thought of God, 
and to clog the channels through which 
spiritual motives and influences reach the 
heart. Unless a perpetual watch is kept 
up, they will leave the soul as blighted in 
its religious sensibilities and activities as is 
the field over which a frosty wind has been 
sweeping in its verdure and fruit. The in- 
dependence which a man feels in the en- 
closure of his home may be fraught with 
danger. He is there responsible to no ex- 
ternal authority. The eye of the public is 
absent, the judgments of the public are 
withdrawn. The necessity for self-control 
and for self-restraint is largely removed. 
In this unhampered freedom in which a 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 1 93 



man indulges when he closes his door upon 
the world without, he may be betrayed into 
intemperate practices even through his de- 
sire for ease and relaxation. The restive- 
ness which leads him to shake off the yoke 
of care which has hung about his neck while 
engaged in the business of the day may go 
so far as to discard the yoke of duty which 
religion imposes upon him as the head of a 
family. The pent-up excitements engen- 
dered by intercourse with his fellow-men 
may at home relieve themselves in sour- 
ness of temper or in expressions of pet- 
ulance. The chafed spirit may forget to 
wear before the gaze of children and domes- 
tics " the gentleness of Christ" The en- 
dearments with which an expectant house- 
hold may be ready to greet the returning 
parent may be repelled as annoyances, and 
rebukes may chill the hearts which were 
longing for a caress. Weariness or indis- 
position may plead for the omission of 
family prayer and the other offices of do- 
mestic piety, until gradually every trace of 
the religious element may disappear from 
the family-life. 

13 



194 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

The old law which required the Israelite 

to write the precepts of the Lord upon 
the posts of his house and upon his gates 
(Deut. vi. 9) that he might be reminded of 
them as often as he crossed the threshold 
of his home is one which needs virtually to 
be observed by every Christian, for Satan 
may still insinuate himself into the domes- 
tic Eden and beguile both man and woman 
into forgetfulness of the commands of God. 

II. 

Household religion does not depend en- 
tirely upon positive methods and regula- 
tions. There is a form of it which lies 
back of these. It is a pervading spirit 
which gives a religious air or tone to the 
family-life. It is the result of a quiet- 
almost an unconscious— respect for the law 
of God as the principle which shapes in all 
its particulars the economy or house-law of 

the family. 

When it is said (Gen. xviii. 19) of Abra- 
ham's household that they kept the "way 
of the Lord," it is meant that the whole 
manner of their domestic life evinced the 



RELIGION IN THE FA MIL V. 



195 



fact that they were controlled by a regard 
for his will. The same thing ought still to 
be aimed at Families are as capable of 
bearing and of exhibiting character as are 
individuals, They are corporate units and 
may be distinguished by specific marks. 
They have their different habits, pursuits, 
tastes and enjoyments. They are drawn 
together or repelled from one another by 
these predominating qualities. There are 
homes which the visitor at once feels to be 
religious homes, and in regard to which he 
says without any hesitation, "The Lord is 
in this place." There are other homes 
which are just as obviously irreligious. In 
a moment it is evident to the observer that 
God is in no way acknowledged in the 
constitution or the system of living of the 
family. 

The character of a household will, of 
course, mainly depend upon those who are 
at the head of it and who enact and admin- 
ister its laws, but to some extent it is due 
to the agency of each member of it. Now, 
clearly, the follower of Christ will be gross- 
ly forgetful of his duty everywhere to rep- 



I96 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

resent the properties of the "salt" or the 
"leaven" if he does not aim to give to the 
family to which he belongs a decidedly re- 
ligious character. This result cannot be 
reached by a mere display of the symbols 
of religion, such as the presence of the 
Bible on a centre-table or the suspending 
of Scripture mottoes upon the walls., but 
by the effort of each member of the family 
himself to live under the influence of Chris- 
tian motive and principle, and to incite and 
encourage all the other members to do the 
same. It is the brilliancy of the separate 
stars composing it which gives its brilliancy 
to a cons tellation. The Holy Spirit de- 
veloping those virtues of the heart and 
those graces of behavior and of manner 
of which he is the Author, in the person 
of each individual, will throw the combined 
lustre of these heaven-kindled lights into 
the character and the life of the whole fam- 
ily, and the result will be that the Christian 
home will stand among its godless neigh- 
bors an illumined object, like the dwell- 
ings of the Israelites in the midst of the 
darkened abodes of the Egyptians. 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 1 9/ 



III. 

It is too plain a proposition to call for 
argument that the maintenance of a relig- 
ious character in the household requires the 
observance of family worship. 

It is this which most sensibly enthrones 
God in a home, and by a literal expression 
of them gives form and tenacity to its re- 
ligious sentiments. The gathering of a 
family together for the purpose of wor- 
shiping God is the most impressive act in 
which they can engage, and as suggestive 
or instructive as it is impressive. The 
echoes of the morning prayer or the Script- 
ure lesson may linger in the mind of the 
hearer all through the day, and those of the 
evening's devotions may stir good thoughts 
upon the pillow 7 or bring the atmosphere 
of heaven around the soul as sleep bears 
it into that mysterious state which is the 
image of death. The family is such a 
definite organism, its life is such a joint- 
stock of interest in which all the members 
are concerned, and its history necessarily 
contains so much of the experience of each 



I9 g FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

separate constituent, that it would seem it 
must have some method or vehicle of pro- 
claiming its religious faith and sentiment. 
Worship ought to flow through it as nat- 
urally as music flows through the pipes of 
an organ. A family which is never heard 
voicing its united thanksgivings to God or 
laying its wants and cares before his mer- 
cy-seat is an anomaly in the world. 

The professor of religion cannot too soon 
admit to his mind the fact that God, in set- 
ting him at the head of a family, has set him 
there that he may be the priest of the house- 
hold. It is his duty to see that God is wor- 
shiped in his home, and to seek to train 
there, as in a nursery, a band of worshipers 
who may in time perpetuate the hallowed 
ordinance in other homes. The penalty of 
a neglect of this duty will undoubtedly ap- 
pear in the absence of all religious tend- 
encies in the household. It is worthy of 
serious thought whether the drift of the 
youth of the present day away from the 
Church— a fact which is so much deplored 
—may not be owing to this cause, the 
omission of family worship, which is so 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 199 



largely prevalent in the homes of professed 
Christians. 

In the case of most persons the difficulty 
of conducting this exercise is confessedly 
great— at least, in the first attempt. But 
the difficulty has been overcome in innu- 
merable instances, and it should not be re- 
garded is insurmountable in any. It will 
be materially diminished by an honest re- 
flection upon the importance of the end to 
be attained, and by a simple trust in the 
aid promised by God to those who sacrifice 
their own will to his, and it will gradually 
vanish before repeated experiment. Fam- 
ily prayer, perfectly to fill its place, should 
be the free utterance of the person officiating 
in view of the varying phases of the family 
history; and where these are habitually 
reported to God— as they ought to be— by 
the Christian parent in the secrecy of the 
closet, it probably will not be hard to refer 
to them again in the devotions of the do- 
mestic circle. There may possibly be cases 
in which the ability to offer a prayer in 
public can never be acquired. In such 
cases, I would say, by all means let the 



200 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



person avail himself of the aid of such 
forms of prayer as may easily be obtained. 
These may to an imperfect extent give a 
voice to the family heart, and the use of 
their utterances is a thous.and-fold better 
than a silent family altar. 

IV. 

Family religion must include, in some 
form, the instruction of the young in relig- 
ious matters. 

A pious parent, who feels that in being 
pious he is simply being what he ought to 
be, will feel, on the same grounds, that his 
children ought to be pious. And what he 
knows they ought to be he will try to make 
them. And the process by which a child 
is to be made anything is education or 
training. Certainly, he will not become a 
religious person unless he is taught what 
religion is and why he should be religious 
and how he is to be religious. To make 
no effort whatever in this direction is evi- 
dently to renounce all the obligations of 
parental duty. The heart would seem to 
be destitute of all natural as well as of all 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 201 



religions sensibility that could remain un- 
moved by the spectacle of a child in its 
helplessness appealing to a parent to give 
it the clue which shall safely guide it 
through the labyrinth of life upon which 
it has entered. And yet many parents 
excuse themselves from the attempt or 
satisfy themselves with delegating the task 
to servile hands. 

This delinquency becomes the more fla- 
grant when it occurs in the case of children 
dedicated, as they generally are by parents 
professing to be Christians, to God in bap- 
tism. This holy rite is a mockery if it does 
not amount to a solemn pledge made to 
God by the parents to give to their children 
the instruction and the culture needed to 
make them religious. No parent should 
dare to present a child for baptism unless 
he honestly and faithfully means to do this. 
It is superstition to seek baptism for a child 
in the belief that the mere application of 
water and the recital of a set of words will 
magically work the regeneration of its soul, 
and it is hypocrisy to profess to desire mem- 
bership in the kingdom of God for a child 



202 



FOLLOWING CHRIST, 



while the parent has no other purpose 
than to bring it up for the world or for 
the devil. 

The plea of incompetency is here again 
used to cover the neglect of parental duty. 
But surely any one who himself knows what 
it is to be a Christian can teach a child in 
many ways, indirect as well as direct what 
it is to be one, or can in many particulars 
—and these perhaps the most essential 
—make him understand the difference be- 
tween a man who is a Christian and one 
who is not. There are capacities— I might 
even call them instincts — in the nature of 
every child which point toward religion, 
and these may be fostered and cultivated. 
The nurture which is needed for this pur- 
pose is of the simplest sort. One does not 
require to be an adept in theology or a 
master in casuistry to call forth and to train 
such sentiments as conscientiousness, de- 
pendence upon God, reverence for his word 
and ordinances, complacency in virtue and 
aversion to vice, and delight in the evi- 
dences of divine loveliness contained in the 
character and the life of Christ. All of 



RELIGION W THE FAMILY. 203 

these are to be found waiting for develop- 
ment in a youthful mind. 

Every parent professing to be a follower 
of Christ ought to be able to do these two 
things : first, so firmly to attach to himself 
the respect, the confidence and the affec- 
tion of a child that nothing shall ever en- 
tirely obliterate them ; and second, to fasten 
upon the child's mind the conviction that 
those qualities in the parent which have 
excited these feelings are due to his re- 
ligion. When these things have been 
done, a volume of instruction will have 
been imparted which may be more potent 
than any formal homilies or any catecheti- 
cal lessons. A mother beloved, and always 
appearing lovely through the charm which 
her piety gives her, is a living evangel 
perpetually preaching to the heart and the 
conscience of a child, and has been made 
in many instances the wisdom and the 
power of God unto the salvation of her 

child. . 

In teaching the young, the Bible is, ol 
course, the source from which is to be 
drawn the knowledge to be communicated, 



204 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



and instruction is the imparting of this 
knowledge. The manner in which it is to 
be conveyed must be very much determined 
by the wise discretion of the parent. Aids 
in the formal part of this work are to be 
found in the elementary expositions of 
Scripture furnished by all the churches. 
There is, however, an informal way of giv- 
ing instruction in religion which should 
never be divorced from the formal, and 
which may be even more effective than 
that. It consists more in training than in 
teaching — in showing a child how he is to 
apply the principles and actually to put in 
practice the precepts of the Bible. The 
same arts which are employed in teaching 
an infant to walk, and to w r alk in safe places, 
should be employed in teaching a young 
soul to take its steps and to choose its 
paths in the service of God. 

v. 

Religion in the family may be expected, 
on many accounts, to give a prominent 
place to the observance of the Sabbath. 

The Sabbath and the family are kindred 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 



20$ 



institutions, derived from the same source 
—the ordination of God— and aiming at the 
same end, the rescuing of the soul from the 
wearying and the hardening influences of 
secular life. The answer to the Saviour s 
prayer in behalf of his exposed disciples, 
" I pray not that thou shouldest take them 
out of the world, but that thou shouldest 
keep them from the evil" (John xvii. 15), 
very largely comes through the channels 
of the home and the Sabbath. Through 
God's blessing the home may become the 
sanctuary within which the " evil " which 
everywhere tracks the steps of the follower 
of Christ while out in the world cannot in- 
trude ; and, in order to this, it needs to be 
shielded and barred by the hallowing influ- 
ences of a weekly Sabbath against the 
assaults of " evil." 

The benefits conferred upon a household 
by the day of sacred rest are so many and 
so great that the family which does not in- 
clude in its house-law the fourth command- 
ment, and which does not make provision 
for the keeping of it, would proclaim its 
ingratitude as loudly as it proclaims its ir- 



206 



FOLLO WING CHR IS T. 



reverence; and the retribution for such a 
failure will probably appear in the loss of 
many of those special blessings, temporal 
as well as spiritual, which the household 
institution was intended to bestow. 

The effort to make a family a Sabbath- 
keeping one will require much circumspec- 
tion and study on the part of the heads of 
the household. Errors may be committed 
either on the side of over-strictness or on 
that of over-laxness. To strike the mean 
between the two— and in this case it is a 
"golden" one— is not easy. The first 
requisite is to familiarize a family with the 
idea that Sabbath-keeping is a law of the 
household. It should be made to take its 
place in the order of the family-life as nat- 
urally as the occupations of the weekdays 
take theirs. 

The methods may vary more or less in 
their details in different households, but in 
all cases they must aim at distinguishing the 
Sabbath from other days, and distinguishing 
it by giving it a religious character. House- 
hold regulations should show this difference, 
and show it in a negative way, perhaps, as 



RELIGION IN THE FAMILY. 



20/ 



much as in a positive one — that is, as far as 
practicable, they should exclude from the 
Sabbath the employments of the weekday 
and the things which by association excite 
thought about these employments. The 
mind should be disencumbered of the bur- 
den of worldly care which the mere sight 
of the symbols of.it lays upon it On this 
account, if no other, the secular newspaper 
should be eschewed. It is in this way that 
the Sabbath most effectively verifies its 
name as a day of rest, for rest largely con- 
sists in the emancipation of the mind from 
a sense of the obligation to toil. Even the 
badges of servitude need to be withdrawn 
in order that it may feel truly free. 

There is far more rest to be derived from 
laying this injunction — to use a legal phrase 

upon the encroaching anxieties of worldly 

life than is to be found in the stupefaction 
of literal sleep. Rest, however, is not to 
be confounded with inaction. It consists, 
rather, in a change of action. The Sab- 
bath, therefore, needs its occupations, and 
the difficulty in keeping it is to find these 
occupations and to give them a pleasant 



208 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



aspect. Among them, of course, there 
should be a due attention to the public 
worship of God. Where this cannot be 
rendered, as is sometimes the case in rural 
districts, there should be substituted family 
reading of the Scriptures, with singing and 
prayer. Families in which sacred music 
is cultivated will find themselves in posses- 
sion of a decided advantage in the matter 
of Sabbath-keeping. Mere neighborly vis- 
iting and social festivity, simply because 
they are associated with the ordinary 
worldly life, ought to be suspended on 
the Sabbath, but visiting for purposes of 
mercy is a legitimate employment, and 
perhaps should receive more attention 
than it does. Weary hours might profit- 
ably be filled up in this way. 

The quiet of the day of rest should evi- 
dently be improved by persons who have 
little leisure for religious reading during 
the week. And in the sweet reunion of 
the day large scope may be given to the 
interchange of home endearments. The 
domestic affections are sacred things, and 
the expression of them is not inconsistent 



RELIGION IN THE FA MIL Y. 



209 



with the hallowing of the Sabbath. The 
caress of a parent may give the best pos- 
sible emphasis to the admonitions he has 
been addressing to a child. The day that 
most copiously sheds its dews upon the 
household heart and wakens into fresh 
vigor the spirit of family love is giving 
thereby not the least proof that it is itself 
the gift of Heaven and is fulfilling the end 
for which it was created. A father absent 
from his little flock — as many fathers are- — 
during the week should feel that it is his 
privilege on the Sabbath to enjoy the bless- 
ing which God meant to bestow upon him 
in the companionship of that little flock. 
He should be glad himself, and should 
make all about him glad. There need be 
no restriction to the cheerfulness of the 
day except that which naturally arises from 
the reflection that the Sabbath is religious 
in its character, and must so recognize God 
as its Proprietor that even its gladness 
shall be sanctified by the spirit of wor- 
ship." 

14 



2IO 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



VI. 

All methods for maintaining or promoting 
piety in a family will fail, however, if they 
are not sustained by a consistent, symmet- 
rical and clearly -marked piety in the heads 
of it. 

From them the younger and inferior 
members will be continually getting their 
impression of the religion of Christ; and 
the follower of Christ needs to be a fol- 
lower in whom there is no guile, and in 
regard to whose sincerity there can be no 
question within"^ the precincts of a home. 
In the intimate associations of the house- 
hold circle people come thoroughly to un- 
derstand and to appreciate one another. 
Character cannot succeed in wearing a 
mask there. A parent who does not prac- 
tice religion will frustrate the purpose of 
all his teachings. It is always to be borne 
in mind that children are not— generally, at 
least— disposed to be religious. The natu- 
ral or "carnal mind" in them as in others 
is " enmity against God." It soon shows a 
repugnance to his law. The regimen it im- 



RELIGION IN THE FA MIL V. 211 

poses upon them puts an annoying check 
upon the wild play of their desires and 
passions, and is a yoke which they are only 
too ready to elude where an occasion or a 
pretext is offered them. If any ground to 
distrust the claim of religion to be the rule 
and the exponent of goodness and the power 
which makes men good is presented to them 
in the conduct of those who profess to be 
its representatives, this aversion to it will 
gather strength as the flame does when 
fuel is added to it. In this matter the Sa- 
viour's saying (Matt. xii. 30) is emphatically 
true : " He that is not with me is against 
me, and he that gathereth not with me 
scattereth abroad." 

Let the Christian parent never forget 
that the " demonstration " which the Holy 
Spirit will use in converting his children 
lies, to a great extent, in that which he is 
making of the purity and the excellence of 
godliness. They need to be won from dis- 
like to the service of God by the sweet 
compulsion which forces them to love the 
parent or the kinsman whom religion has 
made worthy of their love. Everything in 



2 12 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

that parent or that kinsman which reveals 
a defect or a blemish in his character will 
be a weight in the scale against religion. 
It is the poor specimen of religion which 
professedly Christian men are exhibiting 
in their homes, probably, which more than 
anything else contributes to the readiness 
with which young people are taking in the 
current unbelief of the age or adopting the 
sophisms which beguile them into a worldly 
or a sensual life. The man who carries 
with him in his memory the image of a 
father or a mother in which every cherished 
feature is irradiated with the lustre of a 
genuine piety cannot easily become an in- 
fidel or sink so low in baseness as to call 
that a delusion or a falsehood which has 
enshrined such an image in his memory. 



CHAPTER X. 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER YWHERE. 

THE phrase u following- Christ " obvi- 



X ously implies that a religious life is to 
be characterized by uniformity and stability. 
In the nature of it, it ought to be a contin- 
uous and an equable process. It is motion 
produced by the ceaseless attraction of a 
perpetually present object, not the fitful stir 
caused by occasional and irregular impulses. 
It is something by which the Christian is 
always and everywhere to be distinguished. 
In looking at it in various departments and 
under different relations, as w r e have been 
doing in the preceding pages, we have still 
considered it as one unbroken thread weav- 
ing itself into the warp of circumstance and 
maintaining its unity amidst all the facts 
with which it becomes intertwined. This 
comprehensive idea, containing, as it does, 




213 



214 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

a summary of all the details of religious 
living, may suggest a few further reflections 
as a conclusion to this little treatise. 

I. 

It leads us, first, to the conclusion that 
the presence of the Christian spirit in a 
man is demonstrated by the permanence of 
his convictions, sentiments and principles rather 
than by what are called " frames of mind " 
or " excited emotions." 

The awakening of any new affection in 
the soul if it be a wholesome one, or the 
apprehending of any new truth by it if it 
be a valuable one, will naturally be at- 
tended by a certain flush or exhilaration 
of feeling. This is to be expected in re- 
ligion as well as in other phases of experi- 
ence. No man can be conscious of the 
springing up in his heart of such an affec- 
tion as love to God, or can seize with an 
appropriating faith such a truth as that 
« there is therefore, now, no condemnation 
to them which are in Christ Jesus " (Rom. 
viii. i), without being by it transported into 
a distinct element of pleasure. A Chris- 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER Y WHERE. 2 1 5 

tian, passing— as he sometimes does very 
sensibly— from darkness into light, will 
give evidence of the change as much by 
his joyful sensations as by his clear per- 
ceptions. Sometimes a new song is liter- 
ally put into his mouth, and his rapture may 
be unspeakable. 

Now, these first symptoms of a religious 
life are not to be taken as the abiding inci- 
dents of it. In ceasing to be new the af- 
fections and the beliefs which are coincident 
with the beginning of such a life cease to 
excite the subject with their original force 
and are entertained without any percep- 
tible mental agitation. They show their 
presence by their fixedness rather than by 
their vehemence. The intense blaze into 
which a fire is fanned at the kindling of 
it dies down, but the fire fastened upon the 
ignited fuel burns on and emits its heat all 
the day. It is so in religion. It is a mis- 
take to make elevated frames of feeling the 
main proof of spiritual life. This is to put 
a concomitant of religion for religion itself. 
There are times and places where the flame 
may be expected to blaze out, but the fire 



2l6 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



is the substantial thing which always and 
everywhere burns on with a steady glow. 
The Christian is known, and may know 
himself, better by those demonstrations 
which are uniform and regular than by 
those which are occasional and extreme. 
That "abiding" in Christ which the Sa- 
viour makes the test of the living disciple 
(John xv. 4) must consist in such exercises 
as are suitable to all occasions and all con- 
ditions. The "just" man, like his type the 
" shining light" (Prov. iv. 18), should at any 
hour of the day be found in his orbit, fol- 
lowing with an unwavering step the path 
appointed for him by his great Lawgiver, 
Christ. 

II. 

The obligation to be religious always and 
everywhere implies that a Christian should 
habitually be found in a state of preparation 
for all religious duties, and for any partic- 
ular religious duty which may suddenly 
arise. 

The genuine artisan carries his wit and 
his skill with him, and is ready to respond 
to any call that may be made upon him 



RELIGION ALWAYS AND E VER Y WHERE. 2 1 7 

without having to wait to sharpen his in- 
struments and to quicken his faculties. So 
" the man of God" needs to be " thorough- 
ly furnished unto all good works " (2 Tim. 
iii. 17). His soul should be always charged 
with the divine life, and not be required, 
like an exhausted battery, from time to 
time to be replenished with spiritual force. 
The follower of Christ who has to be waked 
up or recalled from some truant position 
every time his Master summons him to a 
service is certainly indulging himself in 
criminal drowsiness or presumption. The 
religious power or inspiration in the healthy 
Christian is something which is always as 
literally on hand and ready for use as is 
the natural power which leads to locomo- 
tion or the natural inspiration which prompts 
to gratitude or to indignation. Men do not 
have to prepare to walk, nor deliberately 
to kindle an emotion before they can thank 
a benefactor or rebuke a wrong-doer. 

A consistent and continuous following of 
Christ will keep the professor of religion 
always in a state of preparation for any 
duty which his religion imposes upon him. 



218 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



Temptation will never find him off his 
guard. An appeal to a religious motive 
will receive an instantaneous response. 
The call of Christ, " Go work to-day in 
my vineyard," at whatever moment it may 
come, will meet with the prompt and honest 
reply, " I go, sir." The wise virgins were 
provided with oil in their vessels and could 
keep their lamps always burning. There 
could be no jar upon their nerves, and 
there need be no flutter of mind or sinking 
of heart when the cry, " Behold, the bride- 
groom cometh!" smote upon their ears at 
the midnight hour. 

The dependence upon special prepara- 
tion as each step in the religious life is to 
be taken is significant of a lame and an 
uncomfortable walk. It assumes that relig- 
ion is something extraordinary — something 
apart from common life ; so that whenever 
an exhibition of it is required, there must 
be a shifting of the soul from one plane to 
another or a putting on of a new character 
for the occasion. Why should the man who 
is accustomed to pray for himself, and who 
knows how to tell his own wants to God, 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER YWHERE. 2 19 

feel embarrassment, and perhaps give a 
refusal, when asked to pray for another? 
And why should so many professed Chris- 
tians, when unexpectedly finding themselves 
present where the Lord's Supper is to be 
administered, decline to participate in it on 
the ground that they have had no opportu- 
nity for preparation ? Does not such scru- 
pulousness, while it seems to express rever- 
ence for the holy ordinance, just as plainly 
confess that in their ordinary state they are 
lacking in the faith and the love which be- 
lievers ought always and everywhere to 
cherish toward their divine Redeemer? 

A healthy condition of soul ought to 
have in it a sufficiency of warmth to make 
it able and ready at all times, without any 
special heating, to answer any demand 
for an expression of affection or devo- 
tion which Christ might present. It would 
carry the believer through all the extraor- 
dinary emergencies into which duty might 
call him as naturally as the waters of a 
full stream fill all the depressions and fit 
into all the windings of the channel through 
which it flows. 



220 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



III. 

Those peculiar privileges of the Chris- 
tian life which are represented under the 
terms peace and comfort and joy are the 
product of that kind of religion which 
manifests itself always and everywhere. 

The delightful sensations of health are 
not produced by tonics and stimulants. It 
is the combined play of all the organs of 
the body in the discharge of their regular 
functions which produces those sensations. 
The Christian who is not well poised and 
equable in his religious frames, who is al- 
ways alternating between high states and 
low states of feeling, and who drops back 
into coldness as soon as the blast of some 
special excitement is turned off from his 
emotions, is not living in a healthy way. He 
will know little of true comfort in religion, 
or of genuine joy in believing, or of that 
peace of God which is able to keep his 
heart and mind through Christ Jesus. A 
settled faith in Christ, a fixed determination 
to follow him, a hearty and entire commit- 
ment of the soul to the method of salvation 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND £ VER YWHERE. 22 1 

and the order of living proposed in the gos- 
pel, so that a suspicion as to one's being in 
Christ or a doubt as to the obligation of 
serving him in any particular would seem 
as anomalous as would a suspicion as to 
one's existence or a doubt as to obeying 
the laws of nature, — these things, which 
simply mean that a Christian is to be al- 
ways and everywhere a Christian, are 
fundamental to all spiritual enjoyment 
O professor of religion, in all positions, 
steadfastly, consistently, inflexibly, be what 
you profess to be, and religion will do for 
you all it promises to do. 

One thing only is needed to secure the 
evenness of the Christian's walk, and that is 
always and everywhere to keep Christ in his 
eye as the object and the mark of his high 
calling. The light which gleams from the 
window of his home, kept constantly in 
view by the traveler groping his way to- 
ward it in the dark, is not only a guide 
to show him the right direction, but also 
an inspiration to help him over the casual 
obstructions of his path and a monitor to 
remind him of the illusions of the night by 



222 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



means of which he might be beguiled into 
a wrong road. The Christian who thus 
perpetually has Christ before him does not 
need special signals to assure him that he 
is in the way of heaven. He knows it just 
as he knows that he is always and every- 
where following Christ. 

IV. 

Unhappily, professors of religion are not 
always consistent and steadfast in their fol- 
lowing of Christ. 

Disciples of Jesus may be found sleep- 
ing where he has commanded them to 
watch. Through heedlessness they may 
have allowed themselves to be " overtaken 
with a fault." Like Demas, they may have 
forsaken the post of duty through love of 
this present world. They may even, like 
Peter, apostatize so far as to deny their 
Lord and to associate themselves with his 
enemies. 

Such defections on the part of Christians 
are, of course, at variance with all their 
obligations. They are criminal enough to 
make them fatal. And yet such breaches 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER YWHERE. 22$ 

do not necessarily sever the connection be- 
tween the soul and Christ. " If we believe 
not, yet he abideth faithful" (2 Tim. ii. 13). 
Always and everywhere present, he is still 
within the sight and the reach of his incon- 
stant follower however far he may have 
wandered. The constancy and the un- 
changeableness of Jesus give hope to the 
backslider. He follows the straying sheep 
which has temporarily ceased to follow him. 
This fact keeps unbroken the connection 
between them. The storm has bruised the 
frail reed and bent it downward to the dust, 
but the sun looks upon it in its prostration 
and with the touch of its ray again lifts it 
into uprightness. So the touch of the Sa- 
viour's gracious hand is on the believer, 
even as he stands on the verge of forsaking 
his Master, so long as there is left in his 
heart a single yearning to prompt him to 
recoil from the final step, and, looking back 
to Jesus, to cry, "To whom shall I go ? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life." Be- 
neath all the accumulated guilt under which 
the faithless Peter lay Jesus could see the 
spark of love still glowing in his breast, and 



224 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

by the question, "Simon, son of Jonas, lov- 
est thou me ?" drew from him the response, 
" Lord, thou knowest all things, thou know- 
est that I love thee," by which his erring 
spirit swung back to the point of loyalty 
and devotion. 

To the fallen Christian I would say, Still, 
in the depth of your sin and shame, follow 
Christ. Follow those craving impulses 
which are drawing you to him, and which 
forbid you to think that he has abandoned 
you. Follow them hopefully as the calls 
by which he is inviting you to return. 
They will bring you back to your right 
position in regard to him. They may even 
ensure the result that in the future you 
shall follow him with a more abiding stead- 
fastness of purpose, and with a warmth of 
love quickened by the remembrance of 
your past errors. 

V. 

The habitual following of Christ is the 
condition of that progress in religious char- 
acter and activity which every professor of 
religion is expected to make. 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND £ VER Y WHERE. 22$ 

To follow is to copy or to imitate. To 
follow Christ is to become like Christ. This 
was one of the ends contemplated by God 
in the scheme of redemption : " For whom 
he did foreknow, he also did predestinate 
to be conformed to the image of his Son, 
that he might be the first-born among many 
brethren" (Rom. viii. 29). This purpose 
will undoubtedly be effected in the case of 
all who, with Christ as the ideal of the man 
of God in their eye, are striving to approach 
nearer and nearer to him in spiritual char- 
acter and life. Such a following of Jesus 
will ensure the growth of the Christian, and 
will probably make it apparent to others, 
whether he sees and feels it or not. The 
infant grows to the stature of manhood 
without being able to detect the stages of 
the process through which he is passing. 

The conditions of growth are to be ob- 
served ; the manner of it is inscrutable. 
The child of God grows into the perfected 
man in the same way. As Christ is formed 
in him, he is conformed to Christ ; and as 
he resembles Christ, he becomes the perfect 
man. The Holy Spirit, whose office it is to 

15 



226 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



make men holy, accomplishes his work by 
bringing them more and more into assimi- 
lation to Christ. This he does by constant- 
ly keeping them under the influence of the 
direct vision of Christ : " We all, with open 
face, beholding as in a glass the glory of 
the Lord, are changed into the same image, 
from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit 
of the Lord" (2 Cor. iii. 18). Always and 
everywhere following Christ, the believer 
may rest in the assurance that God is fin- 
ishing his work in his soul and carrying 
him along, stage after stage, in that process 
of growth by which he is to be presented 
faultless and complete in Christ Jesus. 

VI. 

As following Christ aims, as its present 
result, at making the believer like Christ, 
so, as its ultimate result, it aims at bringing 
the believer into personal association with 
Christ. 

" Father, I will that they also whom thou 
hast given me, be with me, where I am," 
was the last prayer offered by Jesus for his 
disciples on earth (John xvii. 24). To be 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER Y WHERE. 22J 

present with the Lord, St. Paul tells us, is 
coincident with being absent from the body. 
The following of Christ ends at death in 
an introduction to the presence of Christ. 
The process has this consummation infalli- 
bly guaranteed to it, and the believer, in 
pursuing it, is warranted in encouraging 
himself with the expectation of this glo- 
rious issue. The follower of Christ ought, 
therefore, in consistency, to include this 
residence with his Lord in his view of the 
future, and to be accustomed to solace him- 
self amidst the labors and hardships of his 
earthly walk with the anticipation of heaven. 

This hope will often be the only anchor 
which can keep his soul steadfast in the 
storms of life. This is not saying that it 
is required of the Christian that he should 
desire to die. This would be to act insane- 
ly. It would be to deny his nature and 
really to long to extinguish the being to 
which, both by his own instincts and by the 
will of his Maker, he is bidden to cling. It 
is not the spirit of the mystic buried, in a 
mistaken pursuit of holiness, in a monastic 
prison or desert, and dreaming of the con- 



228 



FOLLO WING CHRIS T. 



tents of a paradise which in his imagination 
floats above him, that he is to exhibit. But, 
just as he knows that this life is to have an 
end, it is his privilege to look beyond that 
end and to construe its ending into the in- 
ception of a higher state of being, and to 
balance against the ills of time and the 
painful cost of fidelity to God now the rest 
and the blessedness which are pledged to 
those who are faithful unto the end in fol- 
lowing Christ. 

It is the man who most truly values and 
uses this life as a period of service for 
Christ who is most truly showing his fit- 
ness for the inheritance and the crown 
which Christ will award to his loyal follow- 
ers. But there may be an aspiration in 
the Christian's soul reaching heavenward 
all the while that the natural love of life 
is asserting itself in that soul. It is the 
aspiration which is always aiming at some- 
thing better beyond which nerves and sus- 
tains the spirit in the whole struggle of life. 
The child of God cannot be content with 
present attainments, with present joys, but 
must be conscious of an aspiration which 



RELIGION AL WA YS AND E VER Y WHERE. 22Q 

looks beyond these to the glory which is 
to be revealed. He is saved by the hope 
which forecasts the being with Christ as well 
as by the faith which relies upon Christ, for 
the former is the product of the latter. 

It is not impatience under the present 
allotments of Providence, not the chafing 
of the soul at the burdens and restraints 
with which it is environed, not the pas- 
sionate beating of the imprisoned breast 
against the bars of its cage, which denote 
the temper of the Christian, but it is the 
quiet waiting of the watcher who during 
the night-hours encourages himself with the 
prospect of the daybreak, and the cheerful 
ongoing of the pilgrim pressing through 
the rigors of the wilderness to the Canaan 
beyond the flood. 

Follower of Christ, familiarize your mind 
with the thought that soon and for ever you 
are to be with the Lord. Set over against 
all the attractions of this life the attractions 
of the life which is to come. Assert your 
kinship with God by daring to say, " I shall 
be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness." 
This anticipation, this aspiration, always 



230 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

and everywhere kept in your mind, will 
loosen your attachment to this world, will 
chasten your ardor in the pursuit of its 
joys, will lighten the pressure of its mo- 
mentary sufferings, and will enable you, 
while sharing in the apostle's blessed as- 
surance, " Now are we the sons of God," 
to share also in his exulting hope for the 
future: "It doth not yet appear what we 
shall be, but we know that when he shall 
appear, we shall be like him, for we shall 
see him as he is." 



CHAPTER XI. 



CONCLUSION. 

IT may be well, in order to give practical 
point and direction to the didactic dis- 
cussions contained in the previous chapters, 
to sum them up in a series of resolutions 
embodying— at least, partially — the conclu- 
sions to which we have been brought. It 
is the resolution to perform a duty which 
gives effect to a conviction of duty. The 
man who, by becoming a church-member, 
has acknowledged his obligation to lead a 
religious life, and by that solemn act has 
engaged to lead such a life, should deliber- 
ately shape his convictions into resolutions, 
with the sincere determination to carry 
them into practice. To aid him in this 
work, the following schedule is appended 
to this treatise. 

231 



232 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



I. 

I am resolved, as a member of that dis- 
tinct body of Christ's followers to which I 
have attached myself, constantly to bear in 
mind the responsibilities which belong to 
my corporate character, and in all circum- 
stances to conduct myself as a personal 
representative of that religion which the 
Church of Christ was appointed to illustrate 
to the world. 

II. 

I am resolved to make the Bible my life- 
long study, and to seek, through the bless- 
ing of the Holy Spirit upon my effort, to 
grow more and more in the knowledge of 
divine truth, that I may live more and more 
under the power of it. 

III. 

I am resolved always to be present at 
the house of God at the stated times of 
public worship, unless the providence of 
God should by some clear obstruction pre- 
vent my attendance. 



CONCLUSION. 



233 



IV. 

I am resolved habitually to practice se- 
cret prayer, and to accustom myself to think 
of God and to commune with him during 
the occupations of the day. 

V. 

I am resolved to make my family relig- 
ious as well as myself, and to this end to 
see that they keep holy the Sabbath-day, 
to teach them to become worshipers of 
God by leading them to the place of pub- 
lic worship and by conducting . worship 
with them at home, and to inculcate upon 
them the idea that the law of the house- 
hold is the law of the Lord. 

VI. 

I am resolved to keep Christ in my view 
as the model whom I am to follow, and not 
the imperfect types of piety which I may see 
in the professed Christians around me. 

VII. 

I am resolved to watch against my pecu- 
liar infirmities and perseveringly to en- 



234 FOLLOWING CHRIST. 

deavor to subdue the faults to which I 
am liable. 

VIII. 

I am resolved to be scrupulously honest 
and truthful in all my dealings with my fel- 
low-men. 

:x= 

I am resolved to cultivate charitable feel- 
ings toward all my fellow-members of the 
church, to yield respect to the counsels of 
its officers, and to show such consideration 
for my pastor as to inform him of any occa- 
sion for his services which may occur, 
through sickness or otherwise, in my fam- 
ily or my neighborhood. 

X. 

I am resolved, while acting with kindness 
and courtesy toward all, to abstain from 
such associations, amusements and places 
of resort as might be detrimental to my 
own spiritual good or expose me to the 
charge of giving countenance to the en- 
emies of Christ. 

XI. 

I am resolved to do my part according 
to my ability in bearing the burdens and 



CONCLUSION. 



-1 b 



sustaining the benevolent enterprises of 
the Church. 

XII. 

I am resolved to keep myself informed 
in regard to the work of the Church and 
the progress of Christ's kingdom in the 
world, and for this purpose to provide 
myself and my family, where this is pos- 
sible, with some religious periodical. 

XIII. 

I am resolved, in humble dependence 
upon Christ's help, to maintain my loyalty 
to him under all the temptations which 
may come to me through the allurements 
or the oppositions of the world, or through 
the successes or the reverses which may 
be included in my lot in life. 

XIV. 

I am resolved to place my devotion to 
my worldly business under such restric- 
tions that it shall never interfere with the 
duties which I owe to God as a Christian 
and as a church-member. 



236 



FOLLOWING CHRIST. 



XV. 

I am resolved to remember that as a 
child of God I am also his heir, destined 
to inherit a heavenly home which 1 may 
at any moment be called upon to enter, 
and to use this expectation and this hope 
as a constant means of checking an inor- 
dinate attachment to the present world 
and of keeping myself in a state of readi- 
ness for my departure from it, endeavor- 
ing, in imitation of the apostle's faith, to 
say, "To me to live is Christ, and to die 
is gain " (Phil. i. 21). 



THE END. 



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